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CENTENNIAL ODE, 

/ / 

The above was delivered at the Academy of Music, New York July 4th 1876, and is photo-en 
graved from the Author's manuscript, furnished expressly for This volume. 











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K. B. TREAT, 5 COOPER UNION. 



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ADDRESSES 

HISTORICAL CENTENNIAL 

AND AND 

PATRIOTIC QUADRENNIAL 



DELIVERED IN THE SEVERAL 

STATES OF THE UNION 

JULY 4th, 1876-1883. 

INCLUDING 

ADDRESSES COMMEMORATIVE OF THE FOUR 
HUNDREDTH ANNIVERSARY OF THE 

DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. 

1892-1893. 



EDITED BY 

FREDERICK SAUNDERS, A.M. 

LIBKARIAN OF THE ASTOR LIBRARY. 



NEW YORK : 

E. B. TREAT, 5 COOPER UNION, 

CHICAGO: R. C. TREAT. BOSTON: J. Q. ADAMS & CO. 

1893. 



Entered according to Act of Congress in the year 1877, by 

E. B. TREAT. 

in the Office of the Libarian of Congress, at Washington. 

Copyright. 1893. 






Notice. — Many of the orations, addresses and poems in this volume 
are published for the first time by exclusive arrangements with the re. 
spective authors. The public are cautioned against their use except by 
permission of 

E. B. TREAT, Publisher. 



PREFACE. 



This work, which groups together the choicest of 
the eloquent and patriotic Orations, Addresses and 
Poems, delivered in the several States of the Union, 
on our Centennial Anniversary, being issued under 
the auspices of the respective authors — the docu- 
ments having been submitted to their critical super- 
vision, — forms an authorized and enduring monument 
of that memorable epoch in our national annals. 
Amonor these clustered flowers of rhetoric will be 
found many of singular beauty and grace ; forming 
as they do, a many-hued garland of rare excellence, 
worthy of the occasion which celebrates the festival 
and fruitage of our first century. A glance at the 
table of contents will reveal a brilliant array of dis- 
tinguished names as contributors to the volume «? 
amonof their number are the following : — Hon. W. 
M. Evarts, Hon. R. C. Winthrop, Rev. Dr. Storrs, 
Ex-Gov. Seymour, Rev. Dr. L. Bacon, Rev. Henry 
Ward Beecher, Dr. Henry Barnard, Gov. Cheney, 
Col. R. G. Ingersoll, Gov. Cullora, Rev. Dr. C. H. 
Fowler, Chancellor Parker, Gen. J. A. Dix, J. G. 
Whittier, W. C. Bryant, Bayard Taylor, &c., &c. 

The work is cosmopolitan in the strictest sense of 
the term. It most strikingly illustrates the freedom 
of speech and opinion, characteristic of our country. 
Here are represented the varieties of social distinc- 



PREF ACE. 



lion among men, — white and black, Jew and Chris- 
tian, Protestant and Catholic, and even the aborig- 
inal Red Man of the forest. As a commemorative 
record of the most brilliant bursts of oratory, inspired 
by the enthusiasm of the occasion, and as a perma- 
nent treasury of historic data and valuable statistical 
information, the work will at once commend itself to 
all persons of culture and judgment. With such 
combined attractions, it makes its appeal, alike to the 
statesman, the student and the general reader. 

Although primarily prepared for the American 
public it is no less adapted to the rest of the world, 
since it presents an epitome of our progress, and 
social, civil and political status among the nations. 



CONTENTS. 



[The orations following Pennsylvania are given in the order of the 
admission of the States into the Union. The oration from the District 
of Columbia follows the original thirteen States.J 



Wm. Cullen Bryant ; Centennial Ode, [facsimile of original 

manuscript] Frontispiece. 

Page 

Preface 3 

Contents 5 

John G. Whittier ; National Hymn 12 

Introduction 13 

His Majesty, William, Emperor of Germany and King of 

Prussia ; Congratulatory Letter 15 

PENNS YL VA NIA . 

PHILADELPHIA. 

Gen. Joseph R. Hawley ; Introductory Address 16 

Hon. Thomas W. Ferry, Vice-President of the United States ; 

Address 17 

Right Rev. Wm. Bacon Stevens, D.D., LL.D.; Prayer. . . 19 

Oliver Wendell Holmes ; Hymn — Welcome to All Nations. 21 / 

Bayard Taylor ; Centennial Ode 22 

Dexter Smith ; March— Our National Banner 32 

Hon. Wm. M. Evarts ; What the Age Owes to America. . . 33 1/ 

PITTSBURGH. 

Hon. Felix R. Brunot ; The Genius of America 62 

Hon. John M. Kirkpatrick ; Echoes from Lexington and 

Bunker Hill. . . . , 65 

DOVLESTOVV1V. 

Hon. Henry Chapman ; The Magnificent Present 74 

Hon. George Lear ; The Beacon Fires of Liberty 76 

DEL A WARE. 

WILMINGTON. 

Hon. John O'Byrne ; The Matchless Story 88 

NEW JERSEY. 

NEWARK. 

Hon. Cortlandt Parker ; The Open Bible 92 

GEORGIA. 

SAVANNAH. 

Col. Albert R. Lamar ; Address 119 



G CONTENTS. 

CONNECTICUT. 

HARTFORD. 

Hon. Eeney Barnard, L.L.D.; Centennial Growth in Na- 

tionality, [ndustries and Education 120 

Rev. Joseph 11. Twitchell; The Grand Mission of America. 128 

NEW II AVION. 

Gen'l Joseph It. Hawley; Address 10 

Prof. Leonard Bacon, D.D.; New Haven One Hundred 
Years Ago 131 

MA SSA CHU SETTS. 

BOSTON. 

Hon. Robert C. Winthiiop ; A Century of Self-Government. 145 
Oliver Wendell Holmes ; Hyrnn — Welcome to All Nations. 21 

TAUNTON. 

Hon. Charles Francis Adams ; The Progress of Liberty. . 197 

H1NOHA1W. 

Hon. Brooks Adams ; The Cost of Popular Liberty. . . . 221 

WORCESTER. 

Hon. Benj. Franklin Thomas ; The New Century 215 

MARYLAND. 

BALTIMORE. 

Dr. J. J. M. Sellman ; The Free Institutions of America. . 229 
Gen'l F. C. Latrobe ; Our National Emblem 235 

SO UTH CA R OLINA . 

AIKEN. 

Dr. Fred. A. Palmer ; Poem — A Centennial Retrospect. . 237 
NEW HAMPSHIRE. 

MANCHESTER. 

Hon. P. C. Cheney ; Address 239 

Judge Isaac W. Smith ; The First Century of Our Republic. 245 
Hon. Lewis W. Clark ; The Destiny of the Republic. . . . 240 

Joseph Kidder ; The Perpetuity of the Republic 251 

Miss Clara B. Heath ; Poem — The Year of Jubilee. . . . 254 

VIRGINIA. 

PORTSMOUTH. 

Prof. J. M. Langston, LL.D. ; The National Utterances, and 

Achievements of Our First Century 257 

YORKTOWN. 

His Excellency, Chester A. Arthur, President of the 
United States ; Welcome to the Guests of the Nation, 
Oct. 19, 1881 880 

Uun. II. <\ Winthroi'; The Surrender of Lord Cornwallis. . 881 



CONTENTS. 7 

NEW YORK. 

NEW YORK CITY. 

Ex-Gov. John A.Dix; Address 270 

Rev. R. S. Storrs, D. D., L. L. D.; The Rise of Constitutional 

Liberty 271 

Hon. Wm. M. EvARTS ; What the Age Owes to America 33 

Wm. Cullen Bryant ; Centennial Ode •. . . 356 

Bayard Taylor ; Song of 1876 320 

Hon. Fernando Wood ; Democracy the Hope of the Nation 321 

Hon. Richard O'Gorman; The Grandeur of Our Republic 328 

Judge H. A. Gildersleeve ; American Citizenship 341 

Rev. Morgan Dix, D. D. ; The Hand of God in History 343 

Rev. Thomas Armitage, D. D.; Our National Influence 351 

Rev. H. H. Birkins ; Our Flag 348 

PEEKSKILl,. 

Rev. Henry Ward Beecher ; The Advance of a Century 357 

NORTHPIKLD, STATEN ISLAND. 

Hon. Geo. Wm. Curtis ; Our Noble Heritage 375 

ROME. 

Ex. Gov. Horatio Seymour ; The Future of the Human Race. . .381 

BINGHAMPTON. 

Rev. J. P. Gulliver, D. D.; Our Success— Our Future 410 

SYRVCUSE. 

Hon. Thomas G. Alvord ; The Nation's Jubilee 398 

BUFFALO. 

Rev. Authur E. Chester, D. T). ; The Experiment of a Free 

Government , 437 

Hon. Geo. W. Clinton ; The Spirit of 1876 *. 426 

J. W. Barker ; Centennial Hymn 444 

ALBANY. 

Alfred B. Street ; A Centennial Hymn— Our Land 445 

PALMYRA. 

Hon. Theodore Bacon ; The Triumphs of the Republic 446 

NORTH CAROLINA. 

VVILLINGTON, MOOR'S CREEK. 

Judge Edw'd Cantwell ; Union and Reconciliation 459 

RHODE ISLAND. 

PROVIDENCE. 

Rev. Jeremiah Taylor, D. D. ; Our Republic , 468 

Hon. Sam'l G. Arnold ; Providence, Past, Present and Future. .477 



8 CONTENTS. 

DISTRICT OF COLUMBIA. 

VASIIINGTOV. 

Hon. L A. GobrIGHT ; A Resume of American History 487 

Prof. J. M. Langston, L. L. D. ; The National Utterances and 
Achievements of our First Century 257 

VERMONT. 

BURLINGTON. 

Hon. Daniel Roberts ; Centennial Address 498 

Hon. Lucius E. Chittenden ; The Character of the Early Settlers 
of Vermont and its Influence upon their Posterity 499 

KENTUCKY. 

COVINGTON. 

Hon. Wm. E. Authur ; The American Age Contrasted 522 

TENNESSEE. 

NASHVILLE, 

Hon. J. G. M. Ramsey, M. D; The Iliad of Patriotism. 543 

MEMPHIS. 

Hon. W. T. Avert ; Historical Address 555 

INDIANA. 

INDIANAPOLIS. 

Hon. B. K. Elliott ; The Glorious Epoch 561 

Rev. Wm. A. Bartlett, D. D. ; The Permanency of the Bepublic.710 

OHIO. 

CINCINNATI. 

Hon. George W. C. Johnson ; Address 573 

Gen'l DurbiN Ward ; The Century Reviewed 575 

CLEVELAND. 

Hon. S. O. Griswold ; The Changes of a Century. 593 

Hon. Harvey Rice ; Address 617 

COLUMBUS. 

Hon. Geo. L. Converse ; Progress of the Human Race 609 

MISSOURI. 

ST. LOUIS. 

Rev. R. A. Holland ; Democracy in Danger 618 

LOUISIANA. 

NEW ORLEANS. 

Rev. Hugh Miller Thompson, D. D. ; Nation Building 729 

SHREVEPORT. 

Rev. T. I. BEASON, D. D.America and Judaism 729 



CONTENTS. y 

MICHIGAN. 

DETROIT. 

Hon. Theodore Romeyn ; National Perils and Safeguards 638 

Mayor A. Lewis ; Introductory Address 653 

Eev. Wm. Aikman, D. D.; An Address 65 ° 

ILLINOIS. 

GENESEO. 

Gov. Shelby M. Cullom ; The Distinctive Features of the Republic.654 

LENA, 

Hon. Andrew Shuman ; Warnings for the Future 722 

AURORA. 

Rev. Wm. A. Bartlett, D.D. ; The Permanency of the Eepublic.710 

CENTENNIAL EXHIBITION. 

Rev. C. H. Fowler, L. L. D.; Illinois, Resources and Record. 662 
Rev. Rob't Collyer, D. D.; A Talk to the Citizens of La Crosse. 765 

PEORIA. 

Col. Rob't G. Ingersoll ; The Meaning of the Declaration 694 

MISSISSIPPI. 

JACKSON. 

Rev. T. I. Beason, D. D. ; America and Judaism 729 

Miss Sarah Dougherty ; Centennial Address 733 

ALABAMA. 

MONTGOMERY. 

Gov. J. W. Watts ; The Fundamental Principles of 1876 736 

MAINE. 

PORTLAND. 

Hon. Geo. F. Talbot ; The Nation's Birthday 745 

ARKANSAS. 

FORT SMITH. 

Judge I. C. Parker; Centennial Oration 756 

WISCONSIN. 

LA CROSSE. 

Rev. Rob't Collyer, D. D. ; A Talk to the Citizens of La Crosse .765 

MADISON. 

Prof. S. H. Carpenter, L. L. D.; Elements of Our Prosperity . 776 

JANESVILLE. 

Prof. A. L. Chapin, D. D; The Relation of Education to the State .785 
Prof. S. S. Rockford ; The Influence of Popular Education upon 
the Nation 788 



10 CONTENTS. 

IOWA. 

DAVENPORT. 

Hon. John F. Dillon ; Our Duty and Responsibility 793 

FLORIDA. 

•JACKSONVILLE. 

Hon. Columbus Drew ; Memories of the Past 809 

TEXAS. 

GALVESTON. 

Col. George Flourney ; The First Century Day of the Nation . .815 
CALIFORNIA. 

SAN FRANCISCO. 

Rev. Horatio Stebbins, D. D. ; Human Progress 824 

T. J. Spear, Esq.; Centennial Hymn 836 

MINNESOTA. 

ST. PAUL. 

Ex-Go V. C. K. Davis ; The Permanency of Our Institutions 837 

OREGON. 

PORTLAND. 

Sam'l L. Simpson, Esq. ; Poem— The Pounded Age 849 

KANSAS. 

LEAVENWORTH. 

Gen'l Nelson A. Miles ; Welcome to the Coming Century 857 

Col. J. H. Gilpatrick ; The Incomparable Republic 859 

L. M. Goddard, Esq.; The Glory, Growth and Greatness of America. 862 

W. VIRGINIA. 

WHEELING. 

Gov. John I. Jacobs ; The Temple of National Liberty 864 

NEBRASKA. 

OMAHA. 

MAYOR C S. Chase ; 1776 Contrasted with 1876 866 

COLORADO. 

DENVER, 

Gov. J. L. Routt ; Centennial Address 873 

NEVADA. 

GOLD HILL, 

Hon. C. E. De Long ; Freedom's Grand Review 874 



CONTENTS. 11 

COLUMBIAN CELEBRATION. 

Hon. RobertO. Wintheop; The surrender of Lord Corn wall is. 879 
Rev. W. K. Huntington, I). I).; The Meaning of the Multitude. 934 
Rev. David Gregg, U.D.; Columbus mid His Forerunners. . 941 
Rev. Robert S. Macarthur, D.D. ; Columbus a Modern 

Abraham 959 

Rev. Joseph Sanderson, !).!>.; Columbus in History. . . . 973 

Thoughts Pertinent to the Celebration, 1892 976 

Rev. H. M. Smith, Rev. J. N. Steele, D.D., Rev. G. R. 
Van de Water, D.I >., Rev. H. Y. Satterlee, D.D., Rev. -I. 
W. Brown, D.D., Rev. W. S. Rainsford, D.D., Rev. E. S. 
Hollowav, Rev. J. H. Rylance, D.D., Rev.W. H. P. Faunee, 
Rev. J. H. Vandyke, Rev. 1). G. Wylie, Rev. C. H. Eaton, 
Rev. J. B. Shaw, D.D., Rev. C. H. Parkhurst, D.D., Rev. T. 
De Witt Talmage, D.D., Rev. Madison Peters, Rev. Father 
O'Reilly. 
Four Hundred Years of American History; Views of Emi- 
nent Men 983 

Rev. J. L. Withrow. D.D., Rev. Frank Russell, D.D., Rev. 
C. L. Thompson, D.D., Rev. Talbot W. Chambers, D.D., 
Rev. James H. Whiton, Ph.D., Rev. John L. Scudder, 
Rev. Robert F. Sample, D.D., Rev. Epher Whitaker, D.D., 
Rev. Wilbur F. Crafts, Rev. Russell H. Conwell. 
His Excellency, Benjamin Harrison, President of the U. S. ; 

Discovery Day Proclamation -1001 

Hon. Hempstead Washburn, Mayor of Chicago; Address at 

Dedication of World's Fair Buildings 1003 

Hon. T. W. Palmer, President of the World's Columbian Ex- 
hibition; Address— The Great Aim of the Columbian Exhi- 
bition 1000 

Hon. Levi P. Morton, Vice-President U. S.; Address. . .1009 
Hon. Henry Watterson; The Age of Progress and Good 

Feeling 1015 

Hon. ChaunceyM. Depew; Oration at Chicago, Oct. 22,1892.1024 
Rev. Wm. H. MlLBURN, D.D.; Invocation, World's Fair Open- 
ing, May 1st, 1893 1039 

Hon. George R. Davis, Director-General; Opening Address 

May 1st, 1893 1042 

His Excellency, Grover Cleveland, President of the U. S. ; 
Address at Opening Exercises 1047 



CENTENNIAL HYMN. 

BY JOHN G. WHITTIER. 

MUSIC BY JOHN E. PAINE OF MASSACHUSETTS, 

Sung by One Thousand Voices of the Centennial Choral Society 
at the Opening of the Centennial Exposition, May 10, 1876. 

Oar fathers' God ! from out whose hand 
The centuries fall like grains of sand, 
We meet to-day, united, free, 
And loyal to our land and Thee, 
To thank Thee for the era done, 
And trust Thee for the opening one. 

Here, where of old, by Thy design, 
The fathers spake that word of Thine, 
Whose echo is the glad refrain 
Of rended bolt and falling chain, 
To grace our festal time, from all 
The zones of earth our guests we call. 

Be with us while the new world greets 
The old world thronging all its streets 
Unvailing all the triumphs won 
By art or toil beneath the sun ; 
And unto common good ordain 
This rivalship of hand and brain. 

Thou, who hast here in concord furled 
The war flags of a gathered world, 
Beneath our Western skies fulfill 
The Orient's mission of good will, 
And, freighted with love's Golden Fleece, 
Send back the Argonauts of peace. 



INTRODUCTORY. 



Less than half a century ago, memorable words were ut- 
tered, on a certain occasion, by one of England's greatest 
thinkers, which may be said to have received from our na- 
tional history, if not their accomplishment, at least their 
successful illustration. "The tree parliament of a free peo- 
ple is the native soil of eloquence, and in that soil will it 
ever flourish and abound — there it will produce those in- 
tellectual effects, which, drive before them whole tribes and 
nations of the human race, and settle the destinies of 
men." 

Our Republic, founded by our Pilgrim fathers upon the 
Bible, with civil and religious liberty for its charter — when 
contrasted with the several States of Europe, may be said 
to be unique ; since, to quote the words of Carlyle ; " They 
are ever in baleful oscillation, afloat as amid raging eddies 
and conflicting sea-currents, not steadfast as on fixed foun- 
dations," — whilst a century of progressive strength attests 
the enduring stability of our country. Castelar has also de- 
clared that " Saxon America, with its immense virgin ter- 
ritories, with its republic, with its equilibrium between 
stability and progress, is the continent of the future ; 
stretched as it is by God, between the Atlantic and the Pa- 
cific — where mankind may plant, essay, and resolve all so- 
cial problems." 

Youngest in the great family of nations, America is thus 
found in the foremost rank of our Christian civilization. 
Although as a nation, she may not boast of the " antique 
glories of the classic arts," yet has she shared liberally with 
others of maturer growth, in the triumphs of modern genius 
and inventive skill, while she may pre-eminently claim the 
honor of having given to the world the well-attested illus- 
tration of the feasibility of popular self-government. 

" This is thy praise America ! Thy power ! 
Thou best of climes by Science visited, — 
By Freedom blest 1 " 



INTRODUCTORY. 



History has its representative eras, as well as its repre- 
sentative men ; and our American Republic lias in this, 
its first century, been eminently signalized by both. No 
century of the world's history has been so replete with 
grand events, or ennobled by so many illustrious names as 
ours. No epoch has been characterized by such mag- 
nificent achievements in science, art, literature, aesthetic 
culture and popular education. It was one of President 
Lincoln's quaint but expressive remarks made in reference 
to our recent struggle, that " this nation, under God, shall 
have a new birth of Freedom, that governments of the 
people, by the people and for the people, shall not perish 
from the earth." We have, like other nations, had our revo- 
lutionary or heroic age, as well as our age of progressive cul- 
ture, physical and moral. The former has transformed vast 
wildernesses into fertile fields, decked with happy homes and 
cities. The other, as by the enchanter's wand, has " called 
into being a broad empire of self-governed, industrious and 
prosperous millions." Justly proud of our signal prosperity, 
we hail with triumph the glorious present, with our national 
escutcheon thus honored before the world. It has been 
aptly remarked that the " Declaration of Independence " 
by its recognition of the " Rights of Man," gave a new 
impetus to political morality, and marked a new era of 
intellectual revolt against old established institutions and 
modes of thought. It was natural and fitting, therefore, 
that America should be the theatre where the great problem 
of popular liberty and self-government should be solved. 
Nor was that the only grand result achieved — the captive 
has been made free, the barriers that, for so long a time, 
had separated the races, have been removed ; Civil and Re- 
ligious liberty, our boasted national inheritance should 
thus become to us a benison inexpressibly precious, in- 
spiring us with " a truer reverence for the past, a purer 
patriotism and more exalted aims for the present, with an 
exultant and hopeful anticipation for the future.." 



GREETING FROM GERMANY. 

Mr. Schlozer, the German Minister, was instructed by 
His Majesty, "William, Empekok of Germany, 
to deliver to the President of the United States, upon" the 4th of 
July, an autograph letter of congratulation upon the occasion 
of the Centennial Anniversary. A translation of the letter is as 
follows : 

" "William, by the Grace of- God, Emperor of Germany, King of 
Prussia, &c. 

To the President of the United States : 

Great and Good Friend : It has been vouchsafed to you to 
celebrate the Centennial festival of the day upon which the 
great Piepublic over which you preside entered the rank of inde- 
pendent nations. The purposes of its founders have, by a wise 
application of the teachings of the history of the foundation of 
nations, and with insight into the distant future, been realized 
by a development without a parallel. To congratulate you and 
the American people upon the occasion affords me so much the 
greater pleasure, because, since the treaty of friendship, which 
my ancestor of glorious memory, King Frederic II, who now 
rests with God, concluded with the United States, undisturbed 
friendship has continually existed between Germany and Amer- 
ica, and has been developed and strengthened by the ever- 
increasing importance of their mutual relations, and by an 
intercourse, becoming more and more fruitful, in every domain 
of commerce and science. That the welfare of the United 
States, and the friendship of the two countries, may continue 
to increase, is my sincere desire and confident hope. Accept 
the renewed assurance of my unqualified esteem. 

William. 
[Countersigned] Von Bismarck. 

Berlin, June 9th 1876." 



OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

July 4, 1816. 

The opening exercises of the One Hundredth Anniversary of 
our National Independence, in Philadelphia, consisted of an 
overture, " The Great Republic," based on the national air 
" Hail Columbia," by Gilmore's orchestra, arranged for the 
occasion by the composer George F. Bristow, of New Tork, and 
was followed by 

THE INTRODUCTION OF THE PRESIDENT OF THE DAT, 

BY JOSEPH R. HAWLEY, 

PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES CENTENNIAL COMMISSION. 

Fellow-Citizens and Friends of all Nations : — One hundred 
years ago the Republic was proclaimed on this spot. We have 
come together to celebrate the day by peaceful and simple ob- 
servances that feebly express our wonder, our pride and our 
gratitude. This presence proves the good- will existing 
among all nations. For the strangers among us a thousand 
welcomes — [a great burst of applause] — for the land we love, 
liberty, peace, justice, prosperity, and the blessing of God to 
the end of time. By direction of the Commission, I have the 
honor to announce as the presiding officer of the day, the 
Hon. Thomas W. Ferry, Vice-President of the United States. 



SPEECH 

OF 

HON. THOS. W. FERRY, VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED 

STATES, 

DELIVERED AT PHILADELPHIA, .JULY 4tH, 1876. 

Citizens of our Centennial : — The regretful absence of the 
President of the United States casts on me the honor of pre- 
siding on this eventful occasiou. Much as I value the official 
distinction, I prize much more the fact that severally we hold, 
and successfully we maintain, the right to the prouder title of 
American citizen. It ranks all others. It makes office, un- 
makes officers and creates States. One hundred years ago, in 
yonder historic structure, heroic statesmen sat, and gravely 
chose between royal rule and popular sovereignty. Inspired 
with the spirit which animated the Roman sage on Mars' Hill, 
who declared that of one blood were made all nations of men, 
Continental sages echoed in Independence Hall their immortal 
declaration that all men are created free and equal. Appealing 
to the God of justice and of battle for the rectitude and firmness 
of their purpose, they pledged their lives, their fortunes, and 
their sacred honor to the abstract principle of the freedom and 
equality of the human race. 

To-day, in this rounding hour of a century, appealing to the 
game God of justice and of peace, we praise Him for, and pledge 
our hves, our fortunes, and our sacred honor to maintain the 
spirit of that Declaration now made universal by the fundamen- 
tal law of the land. We, the people of the United States, in this 
Centennial memorial, pay double tribute to the Most High — one 
of grateful acknowledgment of the fulfilled pledge of our fathers 
to overthrow royalism, — the other of joyful assurance of the ful- 
filling pledge of their sons to uphold republicanism. The great 
powers of the earth honor the spirit of American fidelity to the 



18 OtTR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

cause of human freedom by the exhibition of their arts and by 
the presence of their titled peers to grace and dignify the world's 
homage paid to the centennial genius of American liberty. 

Three millions of people grown to forty-three millions ; and 
thirteen Colonies enlarged to a nation of thirty-seven States, 
with the thirty-eighth — the Centennial State — forsaking eight 
Territories, and on the threshold of the Union; abiding execu- 
tive admission ; these attest the forecast and majesty of the 
Declaration of 1776. It was nothing short of the utterance of 
the sovereignty of manhood and the worth of American citizen- 
ship. Its force is fast supplanting the assumption of the divine 
right of kings, by virtue of the supreme law of the nation that 
the people alone hold the sole power to rule. Nations succeed 
each other in following the example of this republic, and the 
force of American institutions bids fan- to bring about a general 
reversal of the source of political power. "Whenever that 
period shall come, Great Britain, so magnanimous in presence 
on this auspicious era, will then, if not before, praise the events 
when American Independence was won under Washington, and 
when Freedom and equality of races were achieved under Lin- 
coln and Grant. 



PRAYER 

BY THE RT. REV. WM. BACON STEVENS, D.D., L.L.D., 
BISHOP OF PENNSYLVANIA, 

USED AT THE GRAND CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION IN PHILADELPHIA, 
JULY 4, 1876. 

Almighty and Eternal God, we come before Thee to praise 
Thy glorious name, and to give Thee most bumble and hearty 
thanks, for the inestimable blessings which as a Nation we this 
day enjoy. 

We devoutly recognize Thy Fatherly hand in the planting and 
nurturing of these colonies, in carrying them through the perils 
and trials of war ; in establishing them in peace ; and permit- 
ting us to celebrate this hundredth birthday of our Independ- 
ence. We thank Thee, God, that Thou didst inspire the 
hearts of Thy servants to lay here the foundations of peace and 
liberty ; to proclaim here those principles which have wrought 
out for us such civil and religious blessings ; and to set up here 
a Government which Thou hast crowned by Thy blessing, and 
guarded by Thy hand to this day. 

The whole praise and glory of these great mercies we ascribe, 
God, to Thee ! " Not unto us, O Lord, not unto us, but unto 
Thy name be all the glory," for by Thee only, have we been led 
to take our present position among the nations of the earth. As 
Thou wast our Father's God, in times past, we beseech Thee to 
be our God, in all time to come. Thou hast safely brought us 
to the beginning of another century of national life, defend and 
bless us in the same, O God, with Thy mighty power. Give 
peace and prosperity in all our borders, unity and charity among 
all classes, and a true and hearty love of country to all our peo- 
ple. Keep far from us all things hurtful to the welfare of the 
.nation, and give to us all things necessary for our true growth 
and progress. 



20 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Bless Thou Mighty Ruler of the Universe Thy servants to 
whom are committed the Executive, the Legislative and Judicial 
government of this land ; that Thou wouldst be pleased to direct, 
and prosper all their consultations to the advancement of Thy 
glory, the good of Thy Church, the safety, honor and welfare of 
Thy people ; that all things may be so ordered and settled by 
their endeavors, upon the best and surest foundations, that peace 
and happiness, truth and justice, religion and true liberty may be 
established among us for all generations. Make us to know, 
therefore, that on this day of our Nation's festivity, and to con- 
sider it in our hearts, that Thou art God in heaven above, and 
upon the earth beneath, and that there is no God else beside 
Thee. 

Enable us to keep Thy statutes and Thy judgments which Thou 
hast commanded, that it may go well with us and with our 
children ; that we and they may fear Thy ranie and obey 
Thy law, and that Thou mayest prolong the days of this nation 
through all coming time. 

Establish Thy kingdom in the midst of this land. Make it 
"Emmanuel's land," a "mountain of holiness and a dwelling 
place of righteousness." 

Inspire Thy Church with the spirit of truth, unity and concord, 
and grant that every member of the same in his vocation and 
ministry may serve Thee faithfully. Bless the rulers of this city 
and commonwealth, and grant that they may truly and imparti- 
ally administer justice to the punishment of wickedness and vice, 
and to the maintenance of Thy true religion and virtue. 

Pour out Thy Fatherly blessing upon our whole country, up- 
on all our lawful pursuits and industries, upon all our house- 
holds and institutions of learning and benevolence, that rejoicing 
in Thy smile, and strengthened by Thy might, this nation may 
go on through all the years of this new century a praise and a 
joy of the whole earth, so that all who look upon it may be able 
to say, "Truly God is in the midst of her, she shall not be moved. " 
These things and whatsoever else we need for our national 
preservation and perpetuity, we humbly ask, in the name and 
through the mediation of Thy dear Son, to whom with the 
Father and the Holy Ghost, be ascribed all might, majesty, do- 
minion and power, world without end. Amen. 



WELCOME TO THE NATIONS. 

BY 

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES. 

STTNG AT PHILADELPHIA, JULY 4, 1876. 
I. 

Bright on the banners of lily and rose 
Lo, the last sun of our century sets ! 

Wreath the black cannon that scowled on our foes, 
All but her friendships the Nation forgets ! 
All but her friends and their welcome forgets ! 

These are around her : But where are her foes ? 
Lo, while the sun of her century sets 
Peace with her garlands of lily and rose ! 

H. 

Welcome ! a shout like the war trumpet's swell 

Wakes the wild echoes that slumber around ! 
Welcome ! it quivers from Liberty's bell ; 

Welcome ! the walls of her temple resound ! 

Hark ! the gray walls of her temple resound ! 
Fade the far voices o'er hill-side and dell ; 

Welcome ! still whisper the echoes around ; 

Welcome ! still trembles on Liberty's bell ! 

in. 

Thrones of the Continents ! Isles of the Sea ! 

Yours are the garlands of peace we entwine ; 
Welcome, once more, to the land of the free, 
Shadowed alike by the palm and the pine ; 
Softly they murmur, the palm and the pine ; 
" Hushed is our strife, in the land of the free ; " 
Over your children their branches entwine, 
Thrones of the Continents ! Isles of the Sea ! 



THE NATIONAL ODE. 

BY 

BAYARD TAYLOR. 

DELIVERED AT PHILADELPHIA. JULY 4, 1876. 

L— 1. 

Sun of the stately Day. 
Let Asia into the shadow drift, 
Let Europe bask in thy ripened ray, 
And over the severing ocean lift 
A brow of broader splendor ! 
Give light to the eager eyes 
Of the Land that waits to behold thee rise : 
The gladness of morning lend her, 
With the triumph of noon attend her, 
And the peace of the vesper skies! 
For lo ! she cometh now 
With hope on the lip and pride on the brow, 
Stronger, and dearer, and fairer, 
To smile on the love we bear her, — 
To live, as we dreamed her and sought her, 

Liberty's latest daughter ! 
In the clefts of the rocks, in the secret places, 

We found her traces ; 
On the hills, in the crash of woods that fall, 
We heard her call ; 
When the lines of battle broke, 
We saw her face in the fiery smoke ; 
Through toil, and anguish, and desolation, 

We followed, and found her 
With the grace of a virgin Nation 
As a sacred zone around her ! 
Who shall rejoice 



THE NATIONAL ODK. 23 

With a righteous voice, 
Far-heard through the ages, if not she? 
For the menace is dumb that defied her, 
The doubt is dead that denied her, 
And she stands acknowledged, and strong and free 1 

II.— 1. 

Ah, hark ! the solemn undertone 
On every wind of human story blown. 

A large, divinely-moulded Fate 
Questions the right and purpose of a State, 
And in its plan sublime 

Our eras are the dust of Time. 

The far-off Yesterday of power 
Creeps back with stealthy feet, 

Invades the lordship of the hour, 
And at our banquet takes the unbidden seat. 
From all unchronicled and silent ages 
Before the Future first begot the Past, 

Till History dared, at last, 
To write eternal words on granite pages ; 
From Egypt's tawny drift, and Assur's mound, 

And where, uplifted, white and far, 

Earth highest yearns to meet a star, 
And Man his manhood by the Ganges found, — 
Imperial heads, of old millennial sway, 

And still by some pale splendor crowned, 
Chill as a corpse-light in our full-orbed day, 

In ghostly grandeur rise 
And say, through stony lips and vacant eyes : 
"Thou that assertest freedom, power and fame, 
Declare to us thy claim ! " 

I.— 2. 

On the shores of a Continent cast, 
She won the inviolate soil 



24 OUll NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

By loss of heirdom of all the Past, 
And faith in the royal right of Toil I 
She planted homes on the savage sod : 
Into the wilderness lone 
She walked with fearless feet 
In her hand the divining-rod, 
Till the veins of the mountains beat 
With fire of metal and force of stone ! 
She set the speed of the river-head 

To turn the mills of her bread ; 
She drove her plowshare deep 
Through the prairie's thousand-centuried sleep ; 
To the South, and West, aud North, 
She called Pathfinder forth, 
Her faithful and sole companion, 
Where the flushed Sierra, snowy-starred, 

Her way to the sunset barred, 
And the nameless rivers in thunder and foam 
Channeled the terrible canyon ! 
Nor paused, till her uttermost home 
Was built, in the smile of a softer sky 

And the glory of beauty still to be, 
Where the haunted waves of Asia die 
On the strand of the world-wide seal 

II.— 2. 

The race, in conquering, 
Some fierce Titanic joy of conquest knows 

Whether in veins of serf or king, 
Our ancient blood beats restless in repose, 

Challenge of Nature unsubdued 
Awaits not Man's defiant answer long; 

For hardship, even as wrong, 
Provokes the level-eyed, heroic mood. 
This for herself she did ; but that which lies, 
As over earth the skies, 



THE NATIONAL ODE. 25 

Blending all forms in one benignant glow, — 

Crowned conscience, tender care, 
Justice, that answers every bondman's prayer, 
Freedom where Faith may lead or Thought may dare, 

The power of minds that know, 

Passion of hearts that feel, 

Purchased by blood and woe, 

Guarded by fire and steel. — 
Hath she secured ? What blazon on her shield, 

In the clear Century's light 

Shines to the world revealed, 
Declaring nobler triumph, born of Right? 

I.— 3. 

Foreseen in the vision of sages, 
Foretold when martyrs bled, 
She was born of the longing ages, 
By the truth of the noble dead 
And the fate of the living fed ! 
No blood in her lightest veins 
Frets at remembered chains, 
Nor shame of bondage has bowed her head. 
In her form and features still 
The unblenching Puritan will, 
Cavalier honor, Huguenot grace, 
The Quaker truth and sweetness, 
And the strength of the danger-girdled race 
Of Holland, blend in a proud completeness. 
From the homes of all, where her being began, 
She took what she gave to Man : 
Justice, that knew no station, 

Belief, as soul decreed, 
Free air for aspiration, 
Free force for independent deed ! 
She takes, but to give again, 
As the sea returns the rivers in ruin ; 



26 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

And gathers the chosen of her seed 
From the hunted of every crown and creed. 
Her Germany dwells by a gentler Rhine ; 
Her Ireland sees the old sunbursts shine ; 
Her France pursues some dream divine ; 
Her Norway keeps his mountain pine ; 
Her Italy waits by the wesern brine ; 

And broad-based under all, 
Is planted England's oaken-hearted mood, 

As rich in fortitude 
As e'er went worldward from the island-wall ! 

Fused in her candid light, 
To one strong race all races here unite : 
Tongues melt in hers, hereditary foemen 
Forget their sword and slogan, kith and clan ; 

'Twas glory, once, to be a Roman ; 
She makes it glory, now, to be a Man ! 

II.— 3. 

Bow down ! 
Doff thine geonion crown ! 

One hour forget 
The glory, and recall the debt 

Make expiation, 

Of humbler mood, 
For the pride of thine exultation 
O'er peril conquered and strife subdued ! 
But half the right is wrested 

When victory yields her prize, 
And half the marrow tested 

When old endurance dies. 
In the sight of them that love thee, 
Bow to the Greater that above thee ! 

He faileth not to smite 
The idle ownership of Right, 
Nor spares to sinews fresh from trial, 



THE NATIONAL ODE. 



27 



And virtue schooled in long denial, 
The tests that wait for thee 
In larger perils of prosperity. 

Here, at the Century's awful shrine, 
Bow to thy father's God— and thine ! 

I.— 4. 

Behold! she bendeth now, 
Humbling the chaplet of her hundredyears: 
There is a solemn sweetness on her brow, 
And in her eyes are sacred tears. 
Can she forget. 
In present joy, the burden of her debt, 
When for a captive race 
She grandly staked and won 
The total promise of her power begun, 

And bared her bosom's grace 
To the sharp wound that inly tortures yet ? 

Can she forget 
The million graves her young devotion set, 

The hands that clasp above 

From either side, in sad, returning love? 

Can she forget ? 

Here, where the Ruler of to-day, 

The Citizen of to-morrow, 

And equal thousands to rejoice and pray 

Beside these holy walls are met, 
Her birth-cry, mixed of keenest bliss and sorrow' 
Where, on July's immortal morn 
Held forth, the People saw her head 
And shouted to the world : " The King is dead, 

But lo ! the Heir is born I" 
When fire of Youth, and sober trust of Age, 
In Farmer, Soldier, Priest and Sage, 
Arose and cast upon her 
Baptismal garments, — never robes so fair • 



2$ OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Clad prince in Old-World air, — 
Their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. 

II.— 4. 

Arise ! Re-crown thy head, 
Eadiant with blessing of the Dead ! 

Bear from this hallowed place 
The prayer that purifies thy lips, 
The light of courage that defies eclipse, 
The rose of Man's new morning on thy face? 

Let no iconoclast 
Invade thy rising Pantheon of the Past, 

To make a blank where Adams stood, 
To touch the Father's sheathed and sacred blade, 
Spoil crowns on Jefferson and Franklin laid, 
Or wash from Freedom's feet the stain of Lincoln's blood 1 
Hearken, as from that haunted hall 
Their voices call : 
" We lived and died for thee : 
We greatly dared that thou mightst be : 
So, from thy children still 
We claim denials which at last fulfil,' 
And freedom yielded to preserve thee free I 
Beside clear-hearted Right 
That smiles at Power's uplifted rod, 
Plant Duties that requite, 
And Order that sustains, upon thy sod, 

And stand in stainless might 
Above all self, and only less than God ?" 

III.— 1. 

Here may thy solemn challenge end, 
All-proving Past, and each discordance die 

Of doubtful augury, 
Or in one choral with the Present blend, 

And that half-heard, sweet harmony 



THE NATI0NA1, ODE. 29 

Of something nobler that our sons may see ! 

Though poignant memories burn 
Of days that were, and may again return, 
When thy fleet foot, O Huntress of the Woods, 
Thy slippery brinks of danger knew, 

And dim the eyesight grew 
That was so sure in thine old solitudes, — 

Yet stays some richer sense 
Won from the mixture of thine elements, 

To guide the vagrant scheme, 
And winnow truth from each conflicting dream ! 

Yet in thy blood shall live 
Some force unspent, some essence primitive, 
To seize the highest use of things ; 
For Fate, to mold thee to her plan, 

Denied thee food of kings, 
Withheld the udder and the orchard-fruits, 

Fed thee with savage roots, 
And forced thy harsher milk from barren breasts of man ! 

HI.— 2. 

O sacred Woman-Form, 
Of the first People's need and passion wrought, — 

No thin, pale ghost of Thought, 
But fair as Morning and as heart's-blood warm, — 
Wearing thy priestly tiar on Judah's hills ; 
Clear-eyed beneath Athene's helm of gold; 

Or from Rome's central seat 
Hearing the pulses of the Continents beat 
In thunder where her Jegions rolled ; 
Compact of high heroic hearts and wills, 

Whose being circles all 
The selfless aims of men, and all fulfills ; 
Thyself not free, so long as one is thrall ; 
Goddess, that as a Nation lives, 

And as a Nation dies, 



30 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

That for her children as a man defies, 
And to her children as a mother gives, — 

Take our fresh fealty now ! 
No more a Chieftainess, with wampum-zone 

And feather-cinctured brow, — 
~No more a new Britannia, grown 
To spread an equal banner to the breeze, 
And lift thy trident o'er the double seas ; 

But with unborrowed crest, 
In thine own native beauty dressed, — 
The front of pure command, the unflinching eye, thine own ! 

III.— 3. 

Look up, look forth, and on ! 

There's light in the dawning sky : 
The clouds are parting, the night is gone : 

Prepare for the work of the day ! 

Fallow thy pastures lie 

And far thy shepherds stray, 
And the fields of thy vast domain 

Are waiting for purer seed 

Of knowledge, desire, and deed, 
For keener sunshine and mellower rain ! 

But keep thy garments pure : 
Pluck them back, with the old disdain, 

From touch of the hands that stain ! 

So shall thy strength endure. 
Transmute into good the gold of Gain, 
Compel to beauty thy ruder powers, 

Till the bounty of coming hours 

Shall plant, on thy fields apart, 
With the oak of Toil, the rose of Art ! 

Be watchful, and keep us so : 

Be strong, and fear no foe : 

Be just, and the world shall know I 
With the same love, love us, as we give ; 



THE NATIONAL ODE. 31 



And the day shall never come, 
That finds us weak or dumb 
To join and smite and cry 
In the great task, for thee to die, 
And the greater task, for thee to live 1 



OUE NATIONAL BANNEK. 

"A GRAND TRIUMPHAL MARCH." 

BY DEXTER SMITH, 

RENDERED AT PHILADELPHIA JULY, 4, 1876. 



I. 

O'er the high and o'er the lowly 
Floats that banner bright and holy 

In the rays of freedom's sun ; 
In the nation's heart imbedded, 
O'er our Union newly wedded, 

One in all, and all in one. 

II. 

Let the banner wave forever. 
May its lustrous stars fade never, 

Till the stars shall pale on high ; 
While there's right the wrong defeating, 
While there's hope in true heart beating, 

Truth and freedom shall not die. 

III. 

As it floated long before us, 
Be it ever floating o'er us, 

O'er our land from shore to shore ; 
There are freemen yet to wave it, 
Millions who would die to save it, — 

Wave it, save it evermore. 



WHAT THE AGE OWES TO AMERICA. 

AN ORATION DELIVERED BY WILLIAM M. EVARTS, 

AT PHILADELPHIA, JULY 4TH, 1876. 
I. 

The event which to-day we commemorate supplies its own re- 
flections and enthusiasms and brings its own plaudits. They do 
not at all hang on the voice of the speaker, nor do they greatly 
depend upon the contacts and associations of the place. The 
Declaration of American Independence was, when it occurred, a 
capital transaction in human affairs ; as such it has kept its 
place in history ; as such it will maintain itself while human 
interest in human institutions shall endure. The scene and the 
actors, for their profound impression upon the world, at the 
time and ever since, have owed nothing to dramatic effects, no- 
thing to epical exaggerations. To the eye there was nothing 
wonderful, or vast, or splendid, or pathetic in the movement or 
the display. Imagination or art can give no sensible grace or 
decoration to the persons, the place, or the performance, which 
made up the business of that day. The worth and force that 
belong to the agents and the action rest wholly on the wisdom, 
the courage, and the faith that formed and executed the great 
design, and the potency and permanence of its operation upon 
the affairs of the world which, as foreseen and legitimate conse- 
quences, followed. The dignity of the act is the deliberate, cir- 
cumspect, open, and serene performance by these men in the 
clear light of day, and by a concurrent purpose of a civic duty, 
which embraced the greatest hazards to themselves and to all 
the people from whom they held this deputed discretion, but 
which, to their sober judgments, promised benefits to that people 
and their posterity, from generation to generation, exceeding 
these hazards and commensurate with its own fitness. The 
question of their conduct is to be measured by the actual weight 
and pressure of the manifold considerations which surrounded 
the subject before them, and by the abundant evidence that they 
comprehended their vastness and variety. By a voluntary and 
responsible choice they willed to do what was done and what, 



34 OCR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

without their will, would not have been done. Thus estimated, 
the illustrious act covers all who participated in it with its own 
renown, and makes them forever conspicuous among men, as 
it is forever famous among events. And thus the signers of the 
Declaration of our Independence " wrote their names where all 
nations should behold them, and all time should not efface 
them." It was, " in the course of human events," intrusted to 
them to determine whether the fulness of time had come when a 
nation should be born in a day. They declared the independence 
of a new nation in the sense in which men declare emancipa- 
tion or declare war ; the declaration created what was declared. 

Famous always, among men, are the founders of States, and 
fortunate above all others in such fame are these, our fathers, 
whose combined wisdom and courage began the great structure 
of our national existence, and laid sure the foundations of 
liberty and justice on which it rests. Fortunate, first, in the 
clearness of their title and in the world's acceptance of their 
rightful claim. Fortunate, next, in the enduring magnitude of 
the State they founded and the benificence of its protection of 
the vast interests of human life and happiness which have here 
had their home. Fortunate, again, in the admiring imitation of 
their work, which the institutions of the most powerful and most 
advanced nations more and more exhibit ; and last of all, fortu- 
nate in the full demonstration of our later time that their work 
is adequate to withstand the most disastrous storms of human 
fortunes, and survive unwrecked, unshaken and unharmed. 

This day has now been celebrated by a great people, at each 
recurrence of its anniversary, for a hundred years, with every 
form of ostentatious joy, with every demonstration of respect 
and gratitude for the ancestral virtue which gave it its glory, 
and with the firmest faith that growing time should neither ob- 
scure its lustre nor reduce the ardor or discredit the sincerity of 
its observance. A reverent spirit has explored the lives of the 
men who took part in the great transaction ; has unfolded their 
characters and exhibited to an admiring posterity the purity of 
their motives ; the sagacity, the bravery, the fortitude, the per- 
severance which marked their conduct, and which secured the 
prosperity and permanence of their work. 



O&ATlOlSr — WILLIAM M. EVARTS. $5 

II. 

Philosophy has divined the secrets of all this power, and elo- 
Grandeur of tbe quence emblazoned the magnificence of all its re- 
work of 1776. suits The heroic war which fought out the acqui- 
escence of the Old World in the independence of the New; the 
manifold and masterly forms of noble character and of patient 
and serene wisdom which the great influences of the times begat; 
the large and splendid scale on which these elevated purposes 
were wrought out, and the majestic proportions to which they 
have been filled up ; the unended line of eventful progress, cast- 
ing ever backward a flood of light upon the sources of the origi- 
nal energy, and ever forward a promise and a prophecy of unex- 
hausted power — all these have been made familiar to our people 
by the genius and the devotion of historians and orators. The 
greatest statesmen of the Old World for this same period of 100 
years have traced the initial step in these events, looked into 
the nature of the institutions thus founded, weighed by the Old 
World wisdom, and measured by recorded experience, the prob- 
able fortunes of this new adventure on an unknown sea. This 
circumspect and searching survey of our wide field of political 
and social experiment, no doubt, has brought them a diversity 
of judgment as to the past and of expectation as to the future. 
But of the magnitude and the novelty and the power of the for- 
ces set at work by the event we commemorate, no competent 
authorities have ever greatly differed. The eotevnporary judg- 
ment of Burke is scarcely an overstatement of the European 
opinion of the immense import of American independence. He 
declared : " A great revolution has happened — a revolution 
made, not by chopping and changing of power in any of the ex- 
isting States, but by the appearance of a new State, of a new 
species, in a new part of the globe. It has made as great a change 
in all the relations and balances and gravitations of power as the 
appearance of a new planet would in the system of the solar 
world." 

It is easy to understand that the rupture between the Colo- 
nies and the mother country might have worked a result of po- 
litical independence that would have involved no such mighty 
consequences as are here so strongly announced by the most 



36 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

philosophic statesman of his age. The resistance of the Colo- 
nies, which came to a head in the revolt, was led in the name 
and for the maintenance of the liberties of Englishmen, against 
Parliamentary usurpation and a subversion of the British Con- 
stitution. A triumph of those liberties might have ended in an 
emancipation from the rule of the English Parliament, and a 
continued submission to the scheme and system of the British 
monarchy, with an American Parliament adjusted thereto, upon 
the true principles of the English Constitution. Whether this 
new political establishment should have maintained loyalty to 
the British sovereign, or should have been organized under a 
crown and throne of its own, the transaction would, then, have 
had no other importance than such as belongs to a dismember- 
ment of existing empire, but with preservation of existing insti- 
tutions. There would have been, to be sure, a " new state," but 
not " of a new species," and that it was "in a rew part of the 
globe " would have gone far to make the dismemberment but a 
temporary and circumstantial disturbance in the old order of 
things. 

Indeed, the solidity and perpetuity of that order might have 
been greatly confirmed by this propagation of the model of the 
European monarchies on the boundless regions of this continent. 
It is precisely here that the Declaration of Independence has its 
immense importance. As a civil act, and by the people's de- 
cree — and not by the achievement of the army, or through 
military motives — at the first stage of the conflict it assigned a 
new nationality, with its own institutions^. as the civilly preor- 
dained end to be fought for and secured. It did not leave it to be 
an after-fruit of triumphant war, shaped and measured by mil- 
itary power, and conferred by the army on the people. This as- 
sured at the outset the supremacy of civil over military author- 
ity, the subordination of the army to the unarmed people. 

This deliberative choice of the scope and goal of the Revolu- 
tion made sure of two things, which must have been always 
greatly in doubt, if military reasons and events had held the 
mastery over the civil power. The first was, that nothing less 
than the independence of the nation, and its separation from the 
system of Europe, would be attained if our arms were prosper- 



ORATION WILLIAM M EVARTS. 37 

ous; and the second, that the new nation would always be the 
mistress of its own institutions. This might not have been its 
fate had a triumphant army won the prize of independence, not 
as a task set for it by the people, and done in its service, but by 
its own might, and held by its own title, and so to be shaped 
and dealt with by its own will. 

III. 

There is the best reason to think that the Congress which de- 
Objects of the clared our independence gave its chief solicitude, not 
Revolution, to the hazards of military failure, not to the chance 
of miscarriage in the project of separation from England, but to 
the grave responsibility of the military success — of which they 
made no doubt — and as to what should replace, as government 
to the new nation, the monarchy of England, which they con- 
sidered as gone to them forever from the date of the Declaration. 

Nor did this Congress feel any uncertainty, either in disposition 
or expectation, that the natural and necessary result would pre- 
clude the formation of the new Government out of any other 
materials than such as were to be found in society as established 
on this side of the Atlantic. These materials they foresaw were 
capable of, and would tolerate, only such political establishment 
as would maintain and perpetuate the equality and liberty al- 
ways enjoyed in the several colonial communities. But all these 
limitations upon what was possible still left a large range of 
anxiety as to what was probable, and might become actual. One 
thing was too essential to be left uncertain, and the founders of 
this nation determined that there never should be a moment 
when the several communities of the different colonies should lose 
the character of component parts of one nation. By their plan- 
tation and growth up to the day of the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence they were subjects of one sovereignty, bound together in 
one political connection, parts of one country, under one consti- 
tution, with one destiny. Accordingly the Declaration, by its 
very terms, made the act of separation a dissolving by " one peo- 
ple " of "the political bands that have connected them with 
another," and the proclamation of the right and of the fact of 
independent nationality was, " that these United Colonies are, 
and of right ought to be, free and independent States," 



38 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE 

It was thus that, at one breath, " independence and union " 
were declared and established. The confirmation of the first 
by war, and of the second by civil wisdom was but the execu- 
tion of the single design which it is the glory of this great in- 
strument of our National existence to have framed and an- 
nounced. The recognition of our independence, first by France 
and then by Great Britain, the closer union by the Articles of 
Confederation, and the final unity by the Federal Constitution 
were all but muniments of title of that " liberty and union, one 
and inseparable," which were proclaimed at this place and on 
this day 100 years ago, which have been our possession from 
that moment hitherto, and which we surely avow shall be our 
possession forever. 

Seven years of revolutionary war, and twelve years of con- 
summate civil prudence brought us, in turn, to the conclusive 
peace of 1783, and to the perfected Constitution of 178". Few 
chapters of the world's history covering such brief periods, are 
crowded with so many illustrious names, or made up of events 
of so deep and permanent interest to mankind. I cannot stay 
to recall to your attention these characters, or these incidents, 
or to renew the gratitude and applause with which we never 
cease to contemplate them. It is only their relation to the De- 
claration of Independence itself, that I need to insist upon, and 
to the new State which it brought into existence. In this view 
these progressive processes were but the articulation of the 
members of the State, and the adjustment of its circulation to 
the new centres of its vital power. These processes were all 
implied and included in this political creationjland were as ne- 
cessary and as certain, if it were not to languish and to die, as 
in any natural creature. 

Within the hundred years whose flight in our national histo- 
ry we mark to-day, we have had occasion to corroborate by war 
both the independence and the unity of the nation. In our 
war against England for neutrality, we asserted and we establish- 
ed the absolute right to be free of European entanglements in 
time of war as well as in time of peace, and so completed our 
independence of Europe. And by the war of the Constitution 
— a war within the nation — the bonds of our unity were tried 



ORATION — WILLIAM M. EVAETS. 39 

and tested, as in a fiery furnace, and proved to be dependent 
upon no shifting vicissitudes of acquiescence, no partial dissents 
or discontents, but, so far as is predicable of human fortunes, 
irrevocable, indestructible, perpetual. Casibus hcec nullis, nulla 
delebilis osvo 

IV. 

We may be quite sure that the high resolve to stake the fu- 
Our N»w Political ture of a great people upon a system of society 
System. anc i f polity that should dispense with the dog- 

mas, the experience, the traditions, the habits, and the senti- 
ments upon which the firm and durable fabric of the British 
Constitution had been built up, was not taken without a solici- 
tous and competent survey of the history, the condition, the 
temper, and the moral and intellectual traits of the people for 
whom the decisive step was taken. 

It may, indeed, be suggested that the main body of the ele- 
ments, and a large share of the arrangements, of the new 
government were expected to be upon the model of the. British 
system, and that the substantials of civil and religious liberty 
and the institutions for their maintenance and defense were 
already the possession of the people of England and the birth- 
right of the colonists. But this consideration does not much 
disparage the responsibility assumed in discarding the correla- 
tive parts of the British Constitution. I mean the Established 
Church and Throne ; the permanent power of a hereditary 
peerage ; the confinement of popular representation to the 
wealthy and educated classes ; and the ideas of all participation 
by the people in their own government coming by gracious con- 
cession from the royal prerogative and not by inherent right in 
themselves. Indeed, the counter consideration, so far as the 
question was to be solved by experience, would be a ready one. 
The foundation, and the walls, and the roof of this firm and 
noble edifice, it would be said, are all fitly framed together in the 
substantial institutions you propose to omit from your plan and 
model. The convenience, and safety, and freedom, the pride and 
happiness which the inmates of this temple and fortress enjoy, as 
the rights and liberties of Englishmen, are only kept in place and 



40 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

play because of the firm structure of these aneient strongholds of 
religion and law, which you now desert and refuse to build anew. 

Our fathers had formed their opinions upon wiser and deeper 
views of man and Providence than these, and they had the cou- 
rage of their opinions. 

Tracing the progress of mankind in the ascending path of civ- 
ilization, enlightenment, and moral and intellectual culture, 
they found that the Divine ordinance of government, in every 
stage of the ascent, was adjustable on principles of common rea- 
son to the actual condition of a people, and always had for its 
objects, in the benevolent councils of the Divine wisdom, the 
happiness, the expansion, the security, the elevation of society, 
and the redemption of man. They sought in vain for any title of 
authority of man over man, except of superior capacity and high- 
er morality. They found the origin of castes and ranks, and 
principalities and powers, temporal or spiritual, in this concep- 
tion. They recognized the people as the structure, the temple, 
the fortress, which the great Artificer all the while cared for and 
built up. As through the long march of time this work ad- 
vanced, the forms and fashions of government seemed to them 
to be but the scaffolding and apparatus by which the develop- 
ment of a people's greatness was shaped and sustained. Satis- 
fied that the people whose institutions were now to be projected 
had reached all that measure of strength and fitness of prepara- 
tion for self-government which old institutions could give, they 
fearlessly seized the happy opportunity to clothe the people with 
the majestic attributes of their own sovereignty, and consecrate 
them to the administration of their own priesthood. 

The repudiation by England of the spiritual power of Eome at 
the time of the Keformation was by every estimate a stupendous 
innovation in the rooted allegiance of the people, a profound dis- 
turbance of all adjustments of authority. But Henry VILL, when 
he displaced the dominion of the Pope, proclaimed himself the 
head of the Church. The overthrow of the ancient monarchy of 
France by the fierce triumph of an enraged people was a catastro- 
phe that shook the arrangements of society from center to circum- 
ference. Napoleon, when he pushed aside the royal line of St.Louis, 
announced, "I am the people crowned," and setup a plebianEm- 



ORATION WILLIAM M. EVARTS. 41 

peror as the impersonation ami depositary in him and bis line 
forever of the people's sovereignty. The founders of our Common- 
wealth conceived that the people of these colonies needed no 
interception of the supreme control of their own affairs, no con- 
ciliations of mere names and images of power from which the 
pith and vigor of authority had departed. They, therefore, did 
not hesitate to throw down the partitions of power and right and 
break up the distributive shares in authority of ranks and orders 
of men which indeed had ruled and advanced the development 
of society in civil and religious liberty, but might well be neglected 
when the protected growth was assured and all tutelary super- 
vision for this reason henceforth could only be obstructive and 
incongruous. 



A glance at the fate of the English essay at a commonwealth, 
Eugiiah and Freneh which preceded, and to the French experiment 
Republic* a t a republic, which followed our own institution 
" of a new State of a new species," will show the marvelous wis- 
dom of our ancestors, which struck the hue between too little and 
too much ; which walked by faith, indeed, for things invisible, but 
yet by sight for things visible ; which dared to appropriate 
everything to the people which had belonged to Caesar, but to 
assume for mortals nothing that belonged to God. 

No doubt; it was a deliberation of prodigious difficulty, and a 
decision of infinite moment, which should settle the new institu- 
tions of England after the execution of the King, and determine 
whether they should be popular or monarchial. The problem 
was too vast for Cromwell and the great men who stood 
about him, and, halting between the only possible opinions they 
simply robbed the throne of stability, without giving to the peo- 
ple the choice of their rulers. Had Cromwell assumed the state 
and style of King, and assigned the Constitutional limits of pre- 
rogative, the statesmen of England would have anticipated the 
establishment of 1688, and suved the disgraces of the intervening 
record. If, on the other hind, the ever-recurring consent of the 
people in vesting the Chief Magistracy had been accepted for the 
Constitution of the State, the revolution would have been intelli- 



42 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

gible, ami might Lave proved permanent. But what a " Lord 
Pro lector " was nobody knew, and what he might grow to be 
everybody wondered and feared. The aristocracy could endure 
no dignity above them less than a king's. The people knew the 
measure and the title of the chartered liberties which had been 
wrested or yielded from the King's prerogative ; but what the 
division between them and a Lord Protector would be no one 
could forecast. A brief fluttering between the firmament above 
and the firm earth beneath, with no poise with either, and the 
discordant scheme was rolled away as a scroll. A hundred years 
afterward Montesquieu derided "this impotent effort of the Eng- 
lish to establish a democracy,'' and divined the true cause of its fail- 
ure. The supreme place, no longer sacred by the divinity that 
doth hedge about a king, irritated the ambitious to which it was 
inaccessible, except by faction and violence. " The Government 
was incessantly changed, and the astonished people sought for 
democracy and found it nowhere. After much violence and 
many shocks and blows, they were fain to fall back upon the 
same government they had overthrown." 

The English experiment to make a commonwealth without 
sinking its foundations into the firm bed of popular sovereignty, 
necessarily failed. Its example and its lesson, unquestionably, 
were of the greatest service in sobering the spirit of English 
reform in government, to the solid establishment of constitu- 
tional monarchy, on the expulsion of the Stuarts, and in giving 
courage to the statesmen of the American Revolution to push on 
to the solid establishment of republican government, with the 
consent of the people as its every-day working force. 

But if the English experiment stumbled in its logic by not 
going far enough, the French philosophers came to greater dis- 
aster by overpassing the lines which mark the limits of human 
authority and human liberty, when they undertook to redress the 
disordered balance between people and rulers, and renovate the 
Government of France. To the wrath of the people against 
kings and priests they gave free course, not only to the over- 
throw of the establishment of the Church and State, but to the 
destruction of religion and society. They deified man, and 
thought to raise a tower of man's building, as of old on the plain 



ORATION — WILLIAM M. EVARTS. 43 

of Shinar, which should overtop the battlements of heaven, and 
to frame a constitution of human affairs that should displace the 
providence of God. A confusion of tongues put an end to this 
ambition. And now out of all its evil have come the salutary 
checks and discipline in freedom, which have brought passionate 
and fervid France to the scheme and frame of a sober and firm 
republic like our own, and, we may hope, as durable. 

VI. 

How much, then, hung upon the decision of the great day we 
Our Debt to the celebrate, and upon the wisdom and the will of 
Men of i77c. ^ e men wno fixed the immediate, and if so, the 
present fortunes of this people. If the body, the spirit, the tex- 
ture of our political life had not been collectively declared on 
this day, who can be bold enough to say when and how inde- 
pendence, liberty, union would have been combined, confirmed 
assured to this people ? Behold, now, the greatness of our debt 
to this ancestry, and the fountain, as from a rock smitten in the 
wilderness, from which the stream of this nation's growth and 
power takes its source. For it is not alone iu the memory of 
their wisdom and virtues that the founders of a State transmit 
and perpetuate their influences in its lasting fortunes, and shape 
the character and purposes of its future rulers. " In the birth 
of societies," says Montesquieu, " it is the chiefs of- a State that 
make its institutions ; and afterward it is these institutions that 
form the chiefs of the State." 

And what was this people and what their traits and training 
that could justify this congress of their great men in promul- 
gating the profound views of government and human nature 
which the Declaration embodies and expecting their accept- 
ance as " self-evident ? " How had their lives been disciplined 
and how their spirits prepared that the new-launched ship, 
freighted with all their fortunes, could be trusted to their guid- 
ance with no other chart or compass than these abstract truths ? 
What warrant was there for the confidence that upon these plain 
precepts 'of equality of right, community of interest, reciprocity 
of duty, a polity could be framed which might safely discard 
Egyptian mystery, and Hebrew reverence, and Grecian subtlety, 



44 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

and ltoman strength — dispense, even, with English traditions of 

" Primogenity and due of birth, 
Prerogative of age, crowns, sceptres, lanrele. 

To these questions the answer was ready and sufficient. The 
delegates to this immortal assembly, speaking for the whole 
country and for the respective colonies, their constituents, might 
well say : 

" What we are, such are this people. We are not here as vol- 
unteers, but as their representatives. We have been designated 
by no previous official station, taken from no one employment or 
condition of life, chosen from the people at large because they 
cannot assemble in person, and selected because they know our 
sentiments, and we theirs, on the momentous question which our 
deliberations are to decide. They know that the result of all 
hangs on the intelligence, the courage, the constancy, the spirit 
of the people themselves. If these have risen to a height, and 
grown to a strength and unanimity that our judgment measures 
as adequate to the struggle for independence and the whole sum 
of their liberties, they will accept that issue and follow that lead. 
They have taken up anna to maintain their rights, and will not 
lay them down till those rights are assured. What the nature 
and sanctions of this security are to be they understand must be 
determined by united counsels and concerted action. These they 
have deputed us to settle and proclaim, and this we have done 
to-day. What we have declared the people will avow and confirm- 
Henceforth it is to this people a Avar for the defense of their 
united independence against its overthrow by foreign arms. Of 
that war there can be but one issue. And for the rest, as to the 
Constitution of the new State, its species is disclosed by its ex- 
istence. The condition of the people is equal, they have the 
habits of freemen and possess the institutions of liberty. When 
the- political connection with the parent State is dissolved they 
will be self-governing and self-governed of necessity. As all 
governments in this world, good and bad, liberal or despotic, are 
of men, by men, and for men, this new State, having no castes or 
rank, or degrees discriminating among men in its population, 
becomes at once a government of the people, by the people, and 



ORATION — WILLIAM M. EVAETS. 45 

for the people. So it must remain, unless foreign conquest or 
domestic usurpation shall change it. Whether it shall be a just, 
wise, or prosperous government, it must be a popular govern- 
ment, and correspond with the wisdom, justice, and fortunes of 
the people." 

VIL 

And so this people, of various roots and kindred of the Old 
Attractions of World — settled and transfused in their cisatlantic 
Self-government, home into harmonious fellowship in the sentiments, 
the interests, the habits, the affections which develop and sustain 
a love of country — were committed to the common fortunes 
which should attend an absolute trust in the primary relations 
between man and his fellows and between man and his Maker. 
This Northern Continent of America had been opened and pre- 
pared for the transplantation of the full-grown manhood of the 
highest civilization of the Old World to a place where it could 
be free from mixture or collision with competing or hostile ele- 
ments, and separated from the weakness and the burdens which 
it would leave behind. The impulses and attractions which 
moved the emigration and directed it hither, various in form, 
yet had so much a common character as to merit the description 
of being public, elevated, moral, or religious. They included 
the desire of new and better opportunities for institutions con- 
sonant with the dignity of human nature and with the immortal 
and infinite relations of the race. In the language of the times 
the search for civil and religious liberty animated the Pilgrims, 
the Puritans, and the Churchmen; the Presbyterians, the Catho- 
lics, and the Quakers; the Huguenots, the Dutch, and the 
Walloons; the Waldenses, the Grermans, and the Swedes, in 
their several migrations which made up the colonial population. 
Their experience and fortunes here had done nothing to reduce, 
everything to confirm, the views and traits which brought them 
hither. To sever all political relations, then, with Europe, 
seemed to these people but the realization of the purposes which 
had led them across the ocean — but the one thing needful to 
complete this continent for their home, and to give the absolute 
assurance of that higher life which they wished to lead. The 



46 OtiR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

preparation of the past and the enthusiasms of the future 
conspired to favor the project of self-government and invest it 
with a moral grandeur which furnished the best omens and tho 
best guarantees for its prosperity. Instead of a capricious and 
giddy exaltation of spirit, as at new-gained liberty, a sober and 
solemn sense of the larger trust and duty took possession of 
their souls ; as if the Great Master had found them faithful over 
a few things, and had now made them rulers over many. 

These feelings, common to the whole population, were not of 
sudden origin and were not romantic, nor had they any tendency 
to evaporate in noisy boasts or to run wild in air-drawn projects, 
The difference between equality and privilege, betweeen civil 
rights and capricious favors, between freedom of conscience and 
persecution for conscience' sake, were not matters of moot 
debate or abstract conviction with our countrymen. The story 
of these battles of our race was the warm and living memory of 
their forefathers' share in them, for which, " to avoid insufferable 
grievances at home, they had been enforced by heaps to leave 
their native countries." They proposed to settle forever the 
question whether such grievances should possibly befall them or 
their posterity. They knew no plan so simple, so comprehensive, 
or so sure to this end as to solve all the minor difficulties in the 
government of society by a radical basis for its source, a common 
field for its operation, and an authentic and deliberate method 
for consulting and enforcing the will of the people as the sole 
authority of tho State. 

By this wisdom they at least would shift, within the sphere of 
government, the continuous warfare of human nature, on the 
field of good and evil, right and wrong, 

"Between whoso endless jar justice resides," 

from conflicts of the strength of the many against the craft of 
the few. They would gain the advantage of supplyiug as the 
reason of the State, the reason of the people, and deckle by the. 
moral and intellectual influences of instruction and pursuasion, 
the issue of who should make and who administer the laws. 
This involved no pretensions of the perfection of human nature, 
nor did it assume that at other times, or under other circum- 



ORATION — WILLIAM M. EVA.RTS. 4? 

stances they would themselves have been capable of self-gov- 
ernment ; or, that other people then were, or ever would be so 
capable. Their knowledge of mankind showed them that there 
would be faults and crimes as long as there were men. Their 
faith taught them that this corruptible would put on incorrup- 
tion only when this mortal should put on immortality. Never- 
theless they believed in man and trusted in God, and on 
these imperishable supports they thought they might rest 
civil government for a people who had these living conceptions 
wrought into their own characters and lives. 

The past and the present are the only means by which man 
foresees or shapes the future. Upon the evidence of the past 
the contemplation of the present of this people, our statesmen 
were willing to commence a system which must continually 
draw for its sustenance and growth upon the virtue and vigor 
of the people. From this virtue and this vigor it can alone be 
nourished ; it must decline in their decline and rot in their 
decay. They traced this vigor and virtue to inexhaustible 
springs. And, as the unspent heat of a lava soil, quickened by 
the returning summers through the vintage of a thousand 
years, will still glow in the grape and sparkle in the wine, so 
will the exuberant forces of a race supply an unstinted vigor to 
mark the virtues of immense populations and to the remotest 
generations. 

To the frivolous philosophy of human life which makes all 
the world a puppet show, and history a book of anecdotes, the 
moral warfare which fills up the life of man and the record of 
his race seems as unreal and as aimless as the conflicts of the 
glittering hosts upon an airy field, whose display lights up the 
fleeting splendors of a northern night. But free government 
for a great people never comes from or gets aid from such philo- 
sophers. To a true spiritual discernment there are few things 
more real, few things more substantial, few things more likely 
to endure in this world than human thoughts, human passions, 
human interests, thus molten into the frame and model of our 
State. " morem prceclaram, disciplinamque, quam a majoribus 
accepimus, si quidem teneremus ! " 

I have made no account, as unsuitable to the occasion, of the 



iS OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

distribution of the national power between the General and the 
State governments, or of the special arrangements of executive 
authority, of legislatures, courts, and magistracies, whether of the 
General or of the State establishments. Collectively they form 
the body and the frame of a complete government for a great, 
opulent, and powerful people, occupying vast regions, and em- 
bracing in their possessions a wide range of diversity of climate, 
of soil, and of all the circumstantial influences of external nature. 
I have pointed your attention to the principle and the spirit of 
the government for which all this frame and body exists, to 
which they are subservient, and to whose mastery they must con- 
form. The life of the natural body is the blood, and the circula- 
tion of the moral and intellectual forces and impulses of the body- 
politic, shapes and moulds the national life. I have touched, 
therefore, upon the traits that determined this national life, as 
to be of, from, and for the peopte, and not of, from, or for any 
rank, grade, part, or section of them. In these traits are found 
the " ordinances, constitutions, and customs " by a wise choice of 
which the founders of States may, Lord Bacon says, " sow great- 
ness to their posterity and succession.'' 

And now, after a century of growth, of trial, of experience, of 
observation, and of demonstration, we are met, on the spot and 
on the date of the great Declaration to compare our age with 
that of our fathers, our structure with their foundation, our in- 
tervening history and present condition with their faith and 
prophecy. That " respect to the opinion of mankind," in atten- 
tion to which our statesmen framed the Declaration of Independ- 
ence, we, too, acknowledge as a sentiment most fit to influence 
us in our commemorative gratulations to-day. 

vni. 

To this opinion of mankind, then, how shall we answer the ques- 
the centnry. tioning of this day ? How have the vigor and success of 
the century's warfare comported with the sounding phrase of the 
great manifesto ? Has the new nation been able to hold its ter- 
litory on the eastern rim of the continent, or has covetous Europe 
driven in its boundaries, or internal dissensions dismembered its 
integrity ? Have its numbers kept pace with natural increase> 



ORATION — WILLIAM M. EVARTS. 49 

or have the mother countries received back to the shelter of 
firmer institutions the repentant tide of emigration? or have the 
woes of unstable society distressed arid reduced the shrunken 
population ? Has the free suffrage, as a quicksand, loosened the 
foundations of power and undermined the pillars of the State ? 
Has the free press, with illimitable sweep, blown down the props 
and buttresses of order and authority in Government, driven be- 
fore its wind the barriers which fence in society, and unroofed 
the homes which once were castles against the intrusion of a 
King? Has freedom in religion ended in freedom from religion, 
and independence by law run into independence of law ? Have 
free schools, by too much learning, made the people mad? Have 
manners declined, letters languished, art faded, wealth decayed, 
public spirit withered? Have other nations shunned the evil exam- 
ple, and held aloof from its infection ? Or have reflection and hard 
fortune dispelled the illusions under which this people " burned 
incense to vanity, and stumbled in their ways from the ancient 
paths ?" Have they, fleeing from the double destruction which 
attends folly and arrogance, restored the throne, rebuilt the al- 
tar, relaid the foundations of society, and again taken shelter in 
the old protections against the perils, shocks, and changes in 
human affairs, which 

" Divert and crack, rend and deracinate 
The unity and married calm of States 
Quite from their fixture V 

Who can recount in an hour what has been done in a century, 
on so wide a field, and in all its multitudinous aspects ? Yet I 
may not avoid insisting upon some decisive lineaments of the 
material, social, and political development of our country which 
the record of the hundred years displays, and thus present to 
the " opinion of mankind," for its generous judgment, our nation 
as it is to-day — our land, our people, and our laws. And, first, 
we notice the wide territory to which we have steadily pushed 
on our limits. Lines of climate mark our boundaries north and 
south, and two oceans east and west. The space between, speak- 
ing by and large, covers the whole temperate zone of the contin- 
ent, and in area measures near tenfold the possessions of the thir- 
teen colonies ; the natural features, the climate, the productions, 



50 



OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 



the influences of the outward world, are all implied in the im- 
mensity of this domain, for they embrace all that the goodness 
and the power of God have planned for so large a share of the 
habitable globe. The steps of the successive acquisitions, the im- 
pulses which assisted, and the motives which retarded the ex- 
pansion of our territory ; the play of the competing elements in 
our civilization and their incessant struggle each to outrun the 
other ; the irrepressible conflict thus nursed in the bosom of the 
State, the lesson in humility and patience, " in charity for all and 
malice toward none,''' which the study of the manifest designs of 
Providence so plainly teach us — these may well detain us for a 
moment's illustration. 

IX. 

And this calls attention to that ingredient in the population 
Emancipation, of this country which came, not from the culmin- 
ated pride of Europe, but from the abject despondency of Afri- 
ca. A race discriminated from all the converging streams of 
immigration which I have named by ineffaceable distinctions of 
nature ; which was brought hither by a forced migration and 
into slavery, while all others came by choice and for greater 
liberty ; a race unrepresented in the Congress which issued the 
Declaration of Independence, but now, in the rjersons of 4,000,- 
000 of our countrymen raised, by the power of the great truths 
then declared as it were from the dead, and rejoicing in one 
country and the same constituted liberties with ourselves. 

In August, 1620, a Dutch slave-ship landed her freight in 
Virginia, completing her voyage soon after that of the May- 
flower commenced. Both shij>s were on the ocean at the same 
time, both sought our shores, and planted their seeds of liberty 
and slavery to grow together on this chosen field until the har- 
vest. Until the seperation from England the several colonies, 
attracted each their own emigration, and from the sparseness 
of the population, both in the Northern and Southern colonies, 
and the policy of England in introducing African slavery, 
wherever it might, in all of them, the institution of slavery did 
not raise a definite and firm line of division between the tides 
of population which set in upon New England and Virginia 



ORATION WILLIAM IT. EVA UTS. 51 

from the Okl World, and from them later, as from new points 
of departure, were diffused over the continent. The material 
interests of slavery had not become very strong, and in its 
moral aspects no sharp division of sentiment had yet shown it- 
self. But when unity and independence of government were 
accepted by the colonies, we shall look in vain for any adequate 
barrier against the natural attraction of the softer climate and 
rich productions of the South, which could keep the Northern 
population in their harder climate and on their less grateful 
soil, except the repugnancy of the two systems of free and 
slave labor to commixture. Out of this grew the inpatient, 
and apparently premature, invasion of the Western wilds, push- 
ing constantly onward, in parallel lines, the outposts of the two 
rival interests. What greater enterprise did for the Northern 
people in stimulating this movement was more than supplied to 
the Southern by the pressing necessity for new lands, which the 
requirements of the system of slave cultivaton imposed. Un- 
der the operation of these causes the political divisions of the 
country built up a wall of partition running east and west, with 
the novel consequence of the " Border States " of the country 
being ranged, not on our foreign boundaries, but on this mid- 
dle line, drawn between the free and slave States. The succes- 
sive acquisitions of territory, by the Louisiana purchase, by the 
annexation of Texas, and by the Treaty with Mexico, were all 
in the interest of the Southern policy, and, as such, all suspect- 
ed or resisted by the rival interest in the North. On the other 
hand, all schemes or tendencies toward the enlargement of our 
territory on the north, were discouraged and defeated by the 
South. At length, with the immense influx of foieign immigra- 
tion, re-enforcing the flow of population, the streams of free 
labor shot across the continent. The end was reached. The 
bounds of our habitation were secured. The Pacific posses- 
sions became ours, and the discovered gold rapidly peopled 
them from the hives of free labor. The rival energies and am- 
bitions which had fed the thirst for territory had served their 
purpose, in completing and assuring the domain of the nation. 
The partition wall of slavery was thrown down ; the line of Bor- 
der States obliterated ; those who had battled for territory, as 



62 OUR. NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

an extension and perpetuation of slavery, and those who fought 
against its enlargement, as a disparagement and a danger to 
liberty, were alike confounded. 

Those who feared undue and precipitate expansion of our 
possessions, as loosening the ties of union, and those who desired 
it, as a step toward dissolution, have suffered a common discom- 
fiture. The immense social and political forces which the 
existence of slavery in this country, and the invincible repug- 
nance to it of the vital principles of our state together generated 
have had their play upon the passions and the interests of this 
people, have formed the basis of parties, divided sects, agitated 
and invigorated the popular mind, inspired the eloquence, 
inflamed the zeal, informed the understandings, and fired the 
hearts of three generations. At last the dread debate escaped 
all bounds of reason, and the nation in arms solved, by the 
appeal of war, what was too hard for civil wisdom. With our 
territory unmutilated, our Constitution uncorrupted, a united 
people, in the last years of the century, crowns with new glory 
the immortal truths of the Declaration of Independence by the 
emancipation of a race. 

X. 

I find, then, in the method and the results of the century's 
Promise of National progress of the nation in this amplification of 
Longevity. its domain, sure promise of the duration of 

the body politic, whose growth to these vast proportions has, 
as yet, but laid out the ground plan of the structure. For I 
find the vital forces of the free society and the people's govern- 
ment, here founded, have by their own vigor made this a natu- 
ral growth. Strength and symmetry have knit together the 
great frame as its bulk increased, and the spirit of the nation 
animates the whole : 

"totamque, infusa per artns, 

Mens agitat molem, et iiiagno so, corpore miscet." 

We turn now from the survey of this vast territory, which 
the closing century has consolidated and confirmed as the ample 
home for a nation, to exhibit the greatness in numbers, the 
spirit, the character, the port and mien of the peoj)le that dwell 
in this secure habitation. That in these years, our population 



ORATION WILLIAM M. EVAETS. 53 

has steadily advanced, till it. counts 40,000,000 instead of 
3,000,000, bears witness, not to be disparaged or gainsaid, to 
tlie general congruity of our social and civil institutions with 
the happiness and prosperity of man. But if we consider fur- 
ther the variety and magnitude of foreign elements to whieh 
we have been hospitable, and their ready fusion with the earlier 
stocks, we have new evidence of strength and vivid force in our 
population, whieh we may not refuse to admire. The dispo- 
sition and capacity thus shown give warrant of a powerful 
society. " All nations," says Lord Bacon, " that are liberal of 
naturalization are lit for empire." 

Wealth in its mass, and still more in its tenure and diffusion, 
is a measure of the condition of a people which touches both 
its energy and morality. Wealth has no source but labor. 
" Life has given nothing valuable to man without great labor." 
This is as true now as when Horace wrote it. The prodigious 
growth of wealth in this country is not only, therefore, a signal 
mark of prosperity, but proves industry, persistency, thrift as 
the habits of the people. Accumulation of wealth, too, requires 
and imports security, as well as unfettered activity ; and thus it 
is a fair criterion of sobriety and justice in a people, certainly, 
when the laws and their execution rest wholly in their hands. 
A careless observation of the crimes and frauds which attack 
prosperity, in the actual condition of our society, and the imper- 
fection of our means for their prevention and redress, leads 
sometimes to an unfavorable comparison between the present 
and the past, in this country, as respects the probity of the peo- 
ple. No doubt covetousness has not ceased in the world, and 
thieves still break through and steal. But the better test upon 
this point is the vast profusion of our wealth and (he infinite 
trust shown by the manner in which it is invested. It is not 
too much to say that in our times, and conspicuously in our 
country, a large share of every man's property is in other men's 
keeping and management, unwatched and bejond personal con- 
trol. This confidence of man in man is ever increasing, meas- 
ured by our practical conduct, and refutes these disparagements 
of the general morality. 

Knowledge, intellectual activity, the mastery of nature, the 



54 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

discipline of life — all that makes up the education of a people — 
are developed and diffused through the masses of our popula- 
tion, in so ample and generous a distribution as to make this 
the conspicuous trait in our national character, as the faithful 
provision and extension of the means and opportunities of this 
education, are the cherished institutions of the country. Learn- 
ing, literature, science, art, are cultivated, in their widest range 
and highest reach, by a larger and larger number of our peo- 
ple, not, to their praise be it said, as a personal distinction or a 
selfish possession, but, mainly, as a generous leaven, to quicken 
and expand the healthful fermentation of the general mind, and 
lift the level of popular instruction. So far from breeding a 
distempered spirit in the people, this becomes the main p>rop of 
authority, the great instinct of obedience. " It is by education," 
says Aristotle, " I have learned to do by choice what other men 
do by constraint of fear." 

XL 

The " breed and disposition " of a people, in regard of courage, 
Spirit of our public spirit, and patriotism, are, however, the test 

People. G f the working of their institution, which the world 
most values, and upon which the public safety most depends, 
ft has been made a reproach of democratic arrangements of so- 
ciety and government that the sentiment of honor, and of pride 
in public duty, decayed in them. It has been professed that the 
fluctuating currents and the trivial perturbations of their public 
life discouraged strenuous endeavor and lasting devotion in the 
public service. It has been charged that, as a consequence, 
the distinct service of the State suffered, office and magistracy 
were belittled, social sympathies cooled, love of country drooped, 
and selfish affections absorbed the powers of the citizens, and 
eat into the heart of the commonwealth. 

The experience of our countiy rejects these speculations as 
misplaced and these fears as illusory. They belong to a condi- 
tion of society above which we have long since been lifted, and 
toward which the very scheme of our national life prohibits a 
decline. They are drawn from the examples of history, which 
lodged power formally in the people, but left them ignorant and 



ORATION WILLIAM M. EVAKTS. 55 

abject, unfurnished with the means of exercising it in their own 
right and for their own benefit. In a democracy wielded by the 
arts, and to the ends of a patrician class, the less worthy members 
of that class, no doubt, throve by the disdain which noble char- 
acters must always feel for methods of deception and insincerity, 
and crowded them from the authentic service of the state. But, 
through the period whose years we count to-day, the greatest 
lesson of all is the preponderance of public over private, of so- 
cial over selfish, tendencies and purposes in the whole body of 
the people, and the persistent fidelity to the genius and spirit of 
popular institutions, of the educated classes, the liberal profess- 
ions, and the great men of the country. These qualities trans- 
fuse and blend the hues and virtues of the manifold rays of advanc- 
ed civilization into a sunlight of public spirit and fervid patriotism 
which warms and irradiates the life of the nation. Excess of 
publicity as the animating spirit and stimulus of society more 
probably than its lack will excite our solicitudes in the future. 
Even the public discontents take on this color, and the mind 
and heart of the whole people ache with anxieties and throb with 
griefs which have no meaner scope than the honor and the 
safety of the nation. 

Our estimate of the condition of this people at the close of a 
century — as bearing on the value and efficiency of the principles 
on which the Government was founded, in maintaining and 
securing the permanent well-being of a nation — would, in- 
deed be incomplete if we failed to measure the power and purity 
of the religious elements which pervade aiid elevate our society. 
One might as well expect our land to keep its climate, its fertil- 
ity, its salubrity, and its beauty were the globe loosened from the 
law which holds it in an orbit, where we feel the tempered ra- 
diance of the sun, as to count upon the preservation of the delights 
and glories of liberty for a people cast loose from religion, 
whereby man is bound in harmony with the moral government 
of the world. 

It is quite certain that the present day shows no such solemn 
absorption in the exalted themes of contemplative piety, as 
marked the prevalent thought of the people a hundred years 
ago ; nor so hopeful an enthusiasm for the speedy renovation 



56 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 



of the world, as burst upon us in the marvelous and wide sys- 
tem of vehement religious zeal, and practical good works, in 
the early part of the nineteenth century. But these fires are 
loss splendid, only because they are more potent, and diffuse 
their heat in well-formed habits and manifold agencies of bene- 
ficent activity. They traverse and permeate society in every 
direction. They travel with the outposts of civilization and 
outrun the caucus, the convention, and the suffrage. 

The Church, throughout this land, upheld by no political es- 
tablishment, rests all the firmer on the rock on which its found- 
er built it. The great mass of our countrymen to-day find 
in the Bible — the Bible in their worship, the Bible in then- 
schools, the Bible in their households — the sufficient lessons of 
the fear of God and the love of man, which make them obe- 
dient servants to the free constitution of their country, in all 
civil duties, and ready with their hves to sustain it on the fields 
of war. And now at the end of a hundred years the Christian 
faith collects its worshippers throughout our land, as at the be- 
ginning. What half a century ago was hopefully prophesied 
for our far future, goes on to its fulfillment : " As the sun 
rises on a Sabbath morning and travels westward from New- 
foundland to the Oregon, he will behold the countless millions 
assembling, as if by a common impulse, in the temples with 
which every valley, mountain, and plain will be adorned. The 
morning psalm and the evening anthem will commence with 
the multitudes on the Atlantic Coast, be sustained by the loud 
chorus of ten thousand times ten thousand in the Valley of the 
Mississippi, and be prolonged by the thousands of thousands 
on the shores of the Pacific." 

XII. 

What remains but to search the spirit of the laws of the land 
Strength of -our as framed by and modeled to the popular govern- 

System. ment to which our fortunes were committed by 
the Declaration of Independence ? I do not mean to examine 
the particular legislation, State or General, by which the af- 
fairs of the people have been managed, sometimes wisely and 
well, at others feebly and ill, nor even the fundamental arrange- 



ORATION WILLIAM M. EVARTS. 57 

ment of jjolitical authority, or tbe critical treatment of great 
junctures iu our policy aud history. The hour and the occasion 
concur to preclude so intimate an inquiry. The chief concern 
in this regard, to us and to the rest of the world, is, whether 
the proud trust, the profound radicalism, the wide benevolence 
which spoke in the " Declaration " and were infused into 
the " Constitution " at the first, have been in good faith 
adhered to by the people, and whether now these principles 
supply the living forces which sustain and direct Government 
and society. 

He who doubts needs but to look around to find all things full 
of the original spirit, and testifying to its wisdom and strength. 
We have taken no steps backward, nor have we needed to seek 
other paths in our progress than those in which our feet were 
planted at the beginning. Weighty and manifold have been 
our obligations to the great nations of the earth, to their schol- 
ars, their philosophers, their men of genius and of science, to 
tbeir skill, their taste, their invention, to their wealth, their 
arts, their industry. But in the institutions and methods of gov- 
ernment; in civil prudence, courage, or policy; in statesman- 
ship, in the art of " making of a small town a great city ;" in the 
adjustment of authority to liberty ; in the concurrence of reason 
and strength in peace, of force and obedience in war : Ave have 
found nothing to recall us from the course of our fathers, noth- 
ing to add to our safety or to aid our progress in it. So far 
from this, all modifications of European politics accept the popu- 
lar principles of our system, and tend to our model. The move- 
ments towards equality of representation, enlargement of the 
suffrage, and public education in England ; the restoration of 
unity iu Italy ; the confederation of Germany under the lead of 
Prussia ; the actual Republic in France ; the unsteady throne 
of Spain ; the new hberties of Hungary ; the constant gain to 
the people's share in government throughout Europe; all tend 
one way, the way pointed out in the Declaration of our Inde- 
pendence. 

The care and zeal with which our people cherish and invigo- 
rate the primary supports and defenses of their own sovereign- 
ty, have all the unswerving force and confidence of instincts. 



58 OUK NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

The community and publicity of education, at the charge and 
as an institution of the State, is firmly imbedded in the wants 
and the desires of the people. Common schools are rapidly 
extending through the only part of the country which had been 
shut against them, and follow close upon the footsteps of its 
new liberty to enlighten the enfranchised race. Freedom of 
conscience easily stamps out the first sjDarkles of persecution, 
and snaps as green withes the first bonds of spiritual domina- 
tion. The sacred oracles of their religion the people wisely 
hold in their own keeping as the keys of religious liberty, and 
refuse to be beguiled by the voice of the wisest charmer into 
loosing their grasp. 

Freedom from military power and the maintenance of that 
arm of the Government in the people ; a trust in their own ade- 
quacy as soldiers, when their duty as citizens should need to take 
on that form of service to the State ; these have gained new 
force by the experience of foreign and civil war, and a standing 
army is a remoter possibility for this nation, in its present or 
prospective greatness, than in the days of its small beginnings. 

But in the freedom of the press, and the universality of the 
suffrage, as maintained and exercised to-day throughout the 
length and breath of the land, we find the most conspicuous and 
decisive evidence of the unspent force of the institutions of 
liberty and the jealous guard of its principal defenses. These 
indeed are the great agencies and engines of the people's sover- 
eignty. They hold the same relations to the vast democracy of 
modern society that the persuasions of the orators and the per- 
sonal voices of the assembly did in the narrow confines of the 
Grecian States. The laws, the customs, the impulses, and senti- 
ments of the people have given wider and wider range and 
license to the agitations of the press, multiplied and more fre- 
quent occasions for the exercise of the suffrage, larger and larger 
communication of its franchise. The progress of a hundred 
years finds these prodigious activities in the fullest play — inces- 
sant and allpowerful — indispensable in the habits of the people, 
and impregnable in their affections. Their public service, and 
their subordination to the public safety, stand in their play upon 
one another and in their freedom thus maintained. Neither 



OKATION — WILLIAM M. EVART8. 50 

could long exist in true vigor in our system without the other. 
Without the watchful, omnipresent and indomitable energy of 
the press, the suffrage would languish, would be subjugated by 
the corporate power of the legions of placemen which the adminis- 
tration of the affairs of a great nation imposes upon it, and fall a 
prey to that " vast patronage which," we are told, " distracted, 
corrupted, and finally subverted the Roman Republic." On the 
other hand, if the impressions of the press upon the opinions and 
passions of the people found no settled and ready mode 
of their working out, through the frequent and peaceful suffrage, 
the people would be driven, to satisfy their displeasure at govern- 
ment or their love of change, to the coarse methods of barricades 
and batteries. 

xni. - 

We cannot then hesitate to declare that the original princi- 
Our Country pies of equal society and popular government still 

To-day. inspire the laws, live in the habits of the people, 
and animate their purposes and their hopes. These principles 
have not lost their spring or elasticity. They have sufficed for 
all the methods of government in the past ; we feel no fear for 
their adequacy in the future. Released now from the tasks and 
burdens of the formative period, these principles and methods 
can be directed with undivided force to the everyday conduct 
of government, to the staple and steady virtues of adminis- 
tration. The feebleness of crowding the statute-books with 
unexecuted laws ; the danger of power outgrowing or evading 
responsibility ; the rashness and fickleness of temporary expe- 
dients ; the constant tendency by which parties decline into 
factions and end in conspiracies ; all these mischiefs beset all 
governments and are part of the life of each generation. To 
deal with these evils — the tasks and burdens of the immediate 
future — the nation needs no other resources than the principles 
and the examples which our past history supj>ly. These princi- 
ples, these examples of our fathers, are the strength and the safety 
of our State to-day: " Moribus antiquis, stat res Eomana, virisque." 

Unity liberty, power, prosperity — these are our possessions 
to-day. Our territory is safe against foreign dangers; its com- 



60 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

pleteness dissuades from further ambition to extend it, and its 
rounded symmetry discourages all attempts to dismember it. 
No division into greatly unequal parts would be tolerable to 
either. No imaginable union of interests or passions, large 
enough to include one-half the country, but must embrace 
much more. The madness of partition into numerous and fee- 
ble fragments could proceed only from the hopeless degradation 
of the people, and would form but an incident in general ruin- 

The spirit of the nation is at the highest — its triumph over 
the inborn, inbred perils of the Constitution has chased away 
all fears, justified all hopes, and with universal joy we greet this 
day. We have not proved unworthy of a great ancestry ; we 
have had the virtue to uphold what they so wisely, so firmly 
established. With these proud possessions of the past, with 
powers matured, with principles settled, with habits formed, 
the nation passes as it were from preparatory growth to respon- 
sible development of character, and the steady performance of 
duty. What labors await it, what trials shall attend it, what 
triumphs for human nature, what glory for itself, are prepared 
for this people in the coming century, we may not assume to 
foretell. " One generation passeth away, and another genera- 
tion cometh, but the earth abideth forever," and we reverently 
hope that these our constituted liberties shall be maintained to 
the unending line of our posterity, and so long as the earth 
itself shall endure. 

In the great procession of nations, in the great march of 
humanity, we hold our place. Peace is our duty, peace is our 
policy. In its arts, its labors, and its victories, then, we find 
scope for all our energies, rewards for all our ambitions, renown 
enough for all our love and fame. In the august presence of so 
many nations, which, by their representatives, have done us the 
honor to be witnesses of our commemorative joy and gratula- 
tion, and in sight of the collective evidences of the greatness of 
their own civilization with which they grace our celebration, we 
may well confess how much we fall short, how much we have to 
make up, in the emulative competitions of the times. Yet, even 
in this presence, and with a just deference to the age, the power, 
the greatness of the other nations of the earth, we do not fear 



ORATION WILLIAM M. EVARTfi. 61 

to o,ppeal to the opinion of mankind whether, as we point to 
our land, our people, and our laws, the contemplation should 
not inspire us with a lover's enthusiasm for our country. 

Time makes no pauses in his march. Even while I speak the 
last hour of the receding is replaced by the first hour of the 
coming century, and reverence for the past gives way to the 
joys and hopes, the activities and the responsibilities of the fu- 
ture. A hundred years hence the piety of that generation will 
recall the ancestral glory which we celebrate to-day, and crown 
it wiih the plaudits of a vast population which no man can 
number. By the mere circumstance of this periodicity our gen- 
eration will be in the minds, in the hearts, on the lips of our 
countrymen at the next Centennial commemoration in com- 
parison with their own character and condition, and with the 
great founders of the nation. What shall they say of us? How 
shall they estimate the part we bear in the unbroken line of the 
nation's progress ? And so on, in the long reach of time, for- 
ever and forever, our place in the secular roll of the ages must 
always bring us into observation and criticism. Under this 
double trust, then, from the past and for the future, let us take 
heed to our ways, and while it is called to-day, resolve that the 
great heritage w r e have received shall be handed down through 
the long line of the advancing generations, the home of liberty, 
the abode of justice, the stronghold of faith among men, 
" which holds the moral elements of the world together," and 
of faith in God, which binds that world to His throne. 



THE GENIUS OF AMERICA. 

AN ADDRESS BY HON. FELIX R. BEUNOT, 

DELIVERED AT PITTSBURGH, PA., JULY 4tH, 1876. 

Fellow Citizens and Friends : Yesterday I stood in the Hal] 
of Independence, on the banks of the Delaware, and looked 
upon the immortal Declaration which an hundred years ago 
proclaimed the birth of the nation. To-day I join with you, on 
the banks of the Ohio, to celebrate with appropriate ceremonies 
the Centennial of the Nation's birth. Space and time in the 
progress of those hundred years seem well nigh obliterated 
between the ends of our good old Commonwealth ; so let 
space and time stand aside whilst we mingle the august 
memories of the past with the glories of the present, and cement 
the foundations of a still more imperishable and noble future. 
Were I a sculptor charged with the study of embodying in 
marble the idea of this occasion, I would represent the Geniuf/ 
of America — glancing backwards at monuments upon whoso 
foundations would be inscribed the principles of our forefathers, 
upon which the national institutions have been builded, and out 
of which the prosperity of the nation has grown — and with firm, 
advancing step, and right arm raised she should point onward 
and upward to a pyramid grander than those Egypt inscribed on 
every stone from foundation to apex with the same principles. 
An individual cannot abandon principles of truth, justice, and 
virtue which have guided him from youth to manhood, without 
danger to himself. Neither can a nation without danger, if not 
destruction. 

What are some of these principles which have made us to 
prosper, and without which we cannot live ? Ask the Pilgrim 
Fathers, and the reply comes from the articles of government 
they solemnly signed on the day before they landed from tho 
Mayflower : " In the name of God ! Amen. We whose nanus 
are underwritten * * * having undertaken for the glory of 
God and the advancement of the Christian faith a voyage, * * * 



ADDRESS — FELIX B. BRUN0T. 



ftfl 



solemnly and mutually, in the presence of God and one another, 
combine ourselves into a body politic for our better ordering 
and jurisdiction ; and furthermore, in pursuance of the ends 
aforesaid, and by virtue hereof, to enact and found such just 
and equal laws, * * * unto which we promise all due sub- 
mission and obedience." 

Ask the colonies, and old Roger Williams replies, "that 
every man is permitted to worship God according to his own 
conscience." Ask the fathers of the Republic, and the im- 
mortal words of their declaration ring out the self-evident 
truths that by " Nature's God " and the endorsement of " their 
Creator " all men have certain inahenable rights, among which 
are "life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." The religious 
conscience in the New World "was born free — civil liberty was 
bought with revolutionary blood. Out of the sturdy birth- 
freedom of religious liberty grew the consciousness of the right 
to civil liberty, and they are inseparable as sun and sunlight. 
Take away the sun and the beauties of earth are lost in dark- 
ness — destroy religious liberty and civil liberty dies. As civil 
liberty established by the founders of the Republic did not mean 
freedom from law, so neither did religious liberty mean freedom 
from religion. the Continental and Federal Congress 

opened daily with prayer to Almighty God, maintained the 
sanctity of the Christian Sabbath and appointed days of national 
feasts or thanksgiving. The first official act of the first Pres- 
ident was the public acknowledgement of the religious obliga- 
tion of the nation in thanks to Almighty God, and the first 
thing Congress did after the inauguration was to attend in a 
body religious service in St. Paul's Church for the same 
purpose. 

" While just Government," wrote Washington in 1789, " pro- 
tects all in their religious rights, true religion affords to gov- 
ernment its surest support," and said that incomparable states- 
man in his farewell address : 

" Whatever may be conceded to the influence of refined edu- 
cation on minds of peculiar structure, reason and experience 
both forbid us to expect that national morality can prevail in 
exclusion of religious principles." 

John Adams, his successor in the Presidency, was still more 



01 UUK NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

emphatic in expressing these foundation facts in the nation's 
life, and the records of the times are prolific in proof that the 
statesman expressed the universal sentiment of the people. 

When the Congress of 1787 — the same Congress which or- 
dered the convention which formed our Federal Constitution — 
made a law for the government of the territory north and west 
of the Ohio, and the States to be created out of it, that law de- 
fined the connection between religion and the State in words of 
priceless value : "Religion, morality and knowledge being ne- 
cessary to good government and the happiness of mankind, 
schools and education shall forever be encouraged." 

There were no modern legislators who had forgotten or never 
learned the grand truths of the Declaration which will be read 
in our hearing to-day. Some of them were the signers of that 
immortal title deed of liberty to mankind, and every noble heart 
of them throbbed with the very blood which had been periled 
in its defence. They knew what the Prussians have long since 
discovered and reduced to a State Maxim : "Whatever you 
would have appear in the life of a nation, you must put into 
your schools." [Applause.] 

They had imbided the principles of civil and religious liberty 
from Bible Christianity ; they believed religion to be necessary 
to good government and the happiness of mankind, it was 
taught in the schools of their childhood and they handed it 
down to their children's children. Under this teaching the 
thirteen original States have been well nigh multiplied by three 
and the three million of people of a hundred years ago multi- 
plied by thirteen ! What want we with new doctrines and de- 
vices of government in this our Centennial year ? As in the 
further proceedings of the day we recall principles and patri- 
otic spirit of the founders of the Republic, and recount their 
deeds of honor and sacrifice to win and perpetuate the civil and 
religious liberty we enjoy, let their old rallying cry of God and 
Liberty be ours, my fellow-citizens, and " with a firm reliance 
on the protection of Divine Providence, let us mutually pledge 
to each other our lives, our fortunes and our sacred honors " to 
hand down to the world of 1976 the institutions of Govern, 
ment, religious, educational and political as we have received 
them from the patriot fathers of 1776. [Applause.] 



ECHOES FEOM LEXINGTON AND BUNKER HILL. 

AN ORATION BY HON. JOHN" M. KIRKPATRICK, 

DELIVERED AT PITTSBURGH, PA., JULY 4TH, 187G. 

My Fellow Countrymen : All hail this day ! All hail these 
eladsome summer sun-lit hours, God blessed and flower crowned, 
in which we hold our nation's jubilee ! All hail the past, the 
future and the present, hail! which brings to us a century of 
life completed with this day ! This is our high Centennial feast, 
and to it all the world is bidden and hath come ; and high o'er 
all, our beauteous starry banner waves ! 

The great clock of time whose mighty pendulum, swinging 
in measured arC amidst the lapsing years, vibrates so ceaseless- 
ly and silently between the ages of the past and the eternities of 
the future, has even now just struck our centenary hour and 
marked upon its dial this consummate and full rounded period 
in our nation's life ! 

One hundred years ago this day a new nation was born into 
the world. One hundred years ago this day our forefathers 
dead and gone, with an instinct begotten of freedom, and an in- 
spiration only from on high, amidst the turbulence and throes of 
revolution, the fire and flame and smoke of battle, and the noise 
and shock of contending hosts, gave to the world their immor- 
tal declaration. One may not 

" Gild refined gold 
Or paint tho lilly," 

and so in their own grand thoughts and words let me re-tell you 
what they said this day one hundred years ago. 

They declared these truths to be self-evident. That aU men 
were created equal ; that they were endowed by their Creator 
with certain inalienable rights ; that among these were life, lib- 
erty and the pursuit of happiness ; that to secure these rights 
governments were instituted among men, deriving their just 
power from the consent of the governed ; that whenever any 



66 



OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 



form of government became destructive of these ends, it was the 
right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to institute a new 
government, having its foundation on such principles, and or- 
ganizing its powers in such form as to them should seem mort 
likely to effect their safety and happiness. This is the very lan- 
guage of their declaration ; and to establish it, and in vindica- 
tion of themselves, and as a history of the long train of abuses 
and usurpations and repeated injuries to which they had been 
for a long time subjected, they submitted facts to a candid world. 
And then as the crowning act of their great declaration, as rep- 
resentatives of the United States of America in general Congress 
assembled, and apppaling to the Supreme Judge of the world for 
the rectiude of their intentions, they did, in the name and by the 
authority of the good people of the then Colonies, solemnly pub- 
lish and declare : 

" That these United Colonies are, and of right ought to be free 
and independent States ; that they are absolved from all alle- 
giance to the British Crown, and that all political connection 
between them and the State of Great Britain is and ought to be 
totally dissolved : and that as free and independent States, they 
have full power to levy war, conclude peace, contract alliances, 
establish commerce, and do all other acts and things which in- 
dependent States may of right do. And for the support of this 
declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Pro- 
vidence, we mutually pledge to each other our lives, our for- 
tunes and our sacred honor." 

" From the fullness of his own mind," says Mr. Bancroft, 
" without consulting one single book, Jefferson drafted the res- 
olution." 

Can any words of mine or of any orator to-day add dignity 
to the thought, or lend grace or beauty of power to these 
trumpet-toned, soul-stirring utterances of one hundred years 
ago ? And so, can anything more appropriate be done than to 
read and reread on this our holy, happy festal day, this great 
chart of our life, this sublime, this immortal declaration of the 
great men of a great time, long since entered into their eternal 
rest ? I trow not. How like a very bugle blast their voices, 
caught up in the echoes and the eddies of the lapsing years, 



ORATION — JOHN' M. K1RKPATRIOK. 67 

conie sounding down to us through the century,kindling anew the 
love of country in every heart, and lighting again as in their own 
time the sacred fires of liberty in every valley and upon every 
mountain top throughout the length and breadth of this great 
land. 

" They never fail who die 

In a great cause ; the block may soak their gore ; 

Their heads may sodden in the sun ; their limbs 

Be struug to the city gates and castle walla. 

But still their spirit walks abroad. Though years 

Elapse, and others share as dark a doom, 

They but augment the deep and sweeping thoughts 

Which overpower all others anil conduct 

The world at last to freedom." 

Thus, then, my countrymen, did these men of a heroic age 
speak, and so did they " proclaim liberty throughout all the 
land and to all the inhabitants thereof." Thus, upon these only 
sure foundations did they build that magnificent temple of lib- 
erty and of law, the American republic, whose aisles and porch- 
es we crowd and throng this day, and so up to the sunlight and 
the sky did they carry it — a creation perfect, complete in every 
part, as from a master hand, the admiration of the civilized 
world and " the joy of the whole earth." 

In order rightly and fully to appreciate the great magnitude 
of this undertaking, let us pause for a moment, my countrymen, 
to consider the circumstances and recognize the conditions by 
which these men were surrounded when this the grandest act 
of their lives and time, or of any people or of any time, was by 
them begun. 

I need not say to you that upon their part it was no holiday 
task, no unmeaning act, and no yain and idle ceremony. Not 
at all ; not at all. It was a task replete with toil and trouble, 
and sacrifice and sorrow. It was an act suggestive only of 
doubt, darkness, danger, death. It was a ceremony grand, im- 
pressive and imposing beyond all thought and beyond all de- 
scription, in which the highest and the holiest rights of the hu- 
man race were involved — the whole continent the stage — na- 
tions the actors — and the spectators the people of the civilized 
world ! 

Among the countless thousands who hve on the pages of his- 



68 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

torj — the myriads who have crowded the decades and the cen- 
turies of the past — I know of no men greater than these ; and 
of all the scenes which have ever been enacted on the world's 
stage, I can recall none which in grandeur and sublimity, and 
far-reaching effect upon the human race, surpassed the Ameri- 
can Revolution of one hundred years ago. 

I know this will seem to many the language of exaggeration, 
but let us for a moment consider the facts. Of the grounds of 
the Revolution I need not speak. The Declaration just read 
puts them in such obvious phrases that no words of mine could 
add to their force, or give fresh significance to their meaning and 
expression. It is enough to say that they were clear and well 
taken, and fully justified, any consequences which might follow 
from their submission " to the judgment of a candid world." Let 
us, however, look for a moment at the combatents as they enter 
the arena, prepared and ready to begin this great struggle for 
human rights and the mastery of a continent. 

We were, as you know, but thirteen detached and feeble 
colonies, containing in all scarcely three millions of people, who 
then and thus threw down our gauge of battle to one of the most 
powerful nations on the face of the earth — a great nation whose 
keels vexed every sea, whose possessions were so vast that upon 
them the sun in his going never set, and whose " morning drum 
beat," and whose' evening gun were then as now, heard round and 
round the world. 

Strong only in the integrity of their great cause ; knowing 
well as we, that '' thrice is he armed, who hath his quarrel just.'' 

Putting their trust in the Lord of hosts, with a courage which 
was sublime, and a faith as firm and enduring as " the everlast- 
ing hills," they drew their swords in defense of right, and struck 
for God and native land. 

With a boldness having home only in the hearts of a people 
who dared be free, they entered this their most solemn protest 
against tyranny, and injustice, and oppression, and wrong, tak- 
ing whatever form, and coming whensoever it might, and gave 
all the world to know, that if need be it would be baptized with a 
baptism of blood, and again and again proclaimed out of the 
glistening muzzles of their shotted guns. 



ORATION — JOHN M. KIltKPATKICK. 



69 



Actuated by the loftiest impulse of duty, and inspired ouly by 
a love of country, and the right, which knew no limit, I need 
scarcely tell you that they were all of one heart and of one mind. 
To the leaders at least, the headsman's axe, and the hangman's 
rope, were both the awful possibilities of an unsuccessful future ; 
for remember this was a hundred years ago, when force dominat- 
ed the world, and George the Third was King. They had, there- 
fore, a full knowledge of all the consequences of their great act, 
and a most sincere and solemn appreciation of the position in 
which they then stood. 

" We must be unanimous ; there must be no pulling different 
ways ; we must hang together," said the polished and dignified 
Hancock, as the various members of the Congress came forward 
to sign the declaration. " "We must hang together." " Yes," 
said Franklin, " yes, for if we do not we shall certainly all hang 
separately." What a terrible grim joke it was to be sure ! And 
at such an hour ! But what a reality death proved itself to 
many in the subsequent battle-fields of the war in which the 
young nation covered herself with glory as with a garment, and 
stood fast even unto death in the shining valor of her sons ! 

But these men, my countrymen, had well counted the costs, 
and had reckoned the gain. They knew the high import of the 
work of that great day. The echoes from Lexington Green and 
Concord bridge still trembled and lingered on the summer air, 
and the new-made graves of the proto-martyrs of liberty 
were, almost we might say, even yet unkissed and unloved 
by the daisy, unguarded by the soft green sward of mother 
earth. The great uprising of the year before of course had not 
been forgotten, and the thunders of the guns from Bunker Hill 
were even then ringing in their ears, telling the story how brave 
Warren fell, and bidding them acquit themselves like men in 
all the duties of that eventful day. It mattered not, however, 
for as I have already said, these iron men of an iron age had 
counted well the cost, and already and fully comprehended the 
deep significance of it all. They knew of course it meant a 
separation final and complete from mother land and mother 
love ; with long years of devious and of doubtful war, from 
Long Island to Torktown where the banners of the people 



70 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

floated at last in triumph and in victory over the royal ensign 
of King George, and the freedom of the colonies of North 
America became an assured and a most glorious fact. It meant 
the bloody stories of Trenton and Princeton, and Bennington 
and Brandywine, and Saratoga and Germantown, and Mon- 
mouth and Stony Point, and Savannah and Charleston, and 
Camden and King's Mountain, and the Cowpens and Eutaw, 
and wherever else upon the land, or upon the sea the sublime 
emergencies of the hour called love and loyalty to victory or to 
death. It meant famine and fire and sword. It meant the 
wicked treason of Arnold and the wild unholy ambition of Lee. 
It meant want and woe, the shivering, ill-clad forms and shoe- 
less feet, and bloodstained snow at Valley Forge. It meant 
doubt and despair, sorrow and death. All this it meant and 
more, but all of this they knew. 

But God be praised, and glory be to His great name, it meant 
other and better far. It meant that, in the 

" All Hail hereafter," 

out of this present gloom should come gladness, out of this 
present sorrow a great joy. It meant that, as without death 
there can be no resurrection, and without the grave there can 
be naught of immortality beyond, so, with death, there should 
came, and there would, a certain resurrection and a new life, 
and out of this almost seeming grave of hope there should spring, 
and there would, a great tree — a very " tree of life " — the Tree 
of Liberty whose far reaching branches should fill the w r orld, 
whose blossoms, like the blessing of God, would fall upon all 
lands, and upon all peoples, and whose leaves should in very 
deed be for the healing of all the nations upon the face of the 
earth ! It m; ant that out of the loins of this young nation — 
scarcely yet worthy of the name — there should come, and there 
would, in the years and century of the future, a great people, 
bold, defiant, aggressive, carrying with their flag everywhere the 
genius of free institutions and their laws ; covering a continent 
with their starry banner of empire, and blessing and beautify- 
ing it with an advanced, and let us hope, an ever-advancing 
civilization ! It meant a State without a King, and in the far 
away future — and God be praised that we have lived to see the 



ORATION — JOHN M. KIRKPATKICK. 71 

day— a land without a slave ! It meant a refuge for the down- 
trodden of avery clime without regard to creed or color or con- 
dition It meant the perfection of all government — complete 
equality before the law, and so a people always and wholly free, 
calling no one master, save Him above, the Lord and Master of 
us alhj 

"Great God, we thank thee for this home. 

This bounteous birthland of the free; 
Where wanderers from afar may come 

Aud breathe the air of liberty. 
Still may hfr flowsrs untrammelled spring, 

Her harvests » ave, her cities rise ; 
And yet till time shall fold her wing, 

Remain earth's lovliest paradise." 

Standing as we are this day, my countrymen, amidst all these 
grand results, and gathering to our bosoms as we are, during its 
peaceful summer hours, all over this broad land the golden 
sheaves of a harvest which these men planted in tears and 
watered with their blood, what wonder is it that I have called 
them great, and ranked them as peers of any time ? " By their 
fruits shall ye shall know them ; " so judged and thus consid- 
ered, where in all the pages of history, and amongst aU of those 
world calls great, where, I ask, will you find any greater than 
they ? 

If, however, another Past hath greater dead than ours, and if 
there be graves which hold sweeter and holier dust than ours, 
then had I power I should bid these graves to open, and call 
upon their dead to come forth, that the manhood of the young 
republic might look upon their mighty forms, rightly read the 
lesson of their perfect lives, and so themselves become very 
prophets and priests and kings among men. 

And now, my countrymen, in a concluding word, what is the 
moral of the hour, and what the lesson of this passing pageant, 
this waning day ? 

We have spoken to you of these great men, and their greater 
deeds of one hundred years ago. As best we could we told you 
the wondrous story of the wondrous past. With your own eyes 
you see, and yourselves everywhere read, the open wide spread 
page of the still more wondrous present. It only now and yet 
remains for me to ask of you, and to ask of myself, what of the 



72 OUB NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

future of this great land ? Shall the young republic live ? Shall 
it continue to grow ? Shall it wax greater and stronger in the 
years, and the centuries, and the ages yet to come, as it has 
lived and grown and become great in the years and the century 
whose requiem dirge we have just sung ? Or shall it, like many 
of the republics, and kingdoms, and empires, and dynasties of 
the past, perish utterly from off the face of the earth, leaving not a 
name, not a vestige, not even a wreck behind it on the shores of 
time ? By you and by me, and by all who are with us, and ol 
us to-day, this question — this great question so full freighted 
with the welfare of the race and the future of the world — must 
be answered, must be met. God grant that we answer it wisely 
and meet it well. Let us see to it that wrong be righted every- 
where. Let us see to it that injustice and iniquity, and fraud 
and corruption in high places as in low, wherever found, and in 
whatever form — and of which " 'tis true, 'tis pity, and pity 'tis 
'tis true," the very air seems full to-day — be smitten down by 
the most righteous wrath, and driven out into the wilderness of 
punishment by the just indignation of an incensed and outraged 
people. Let us see to it that no shiboleth of party take prece- 
dence of truth and honor, and that no false Gods of greed or 
gain have place and power over honesty and manhood, integrity 
and the right. So, my countrymen, the Kepublic shall live. So 
it shall continue to flourish and grow and its " bow abide in 
strength ; " and so it shall become greater and stronger and 
cover the earth with its beauty, and all people with its blessings 
until the latest syllable of recorded time, and so we, each for 
himself conscious of highest duty best performed, can say to 
the shining, white-robed hosts, which to-day, even at this- hour, 
are thronging the battlements of the skies, and bending over us 
with their love from their far away home beyond the stars, even 
from that celestial and Eternal City, whose walls are jaspar and 
whose streets are gold, we, too, have fought the fight ; we, too, 
have run the race ; we, too, have kept the faith — and so, by the 
great blessing of God, you have not lived, you have not died, in 
vain! 

" Thon, too, sail on, Oh, ship of State ! 
Sail on. Oh Union, strong and great I 
Humanity, with all its fears, 



ORATION JOHN M. KIRKPATRICK. 73 

With all the hopes of future years, 
Is hanging breathless on thy fate 1 
Wo know what Master laid thy keel, 
What Workman wrought thy ribs of steel, 
Who made each mast, and sail, and rope, 
What anvils rang, what hammers beat 
In what a forge and what a heat 
Were shaped the anchors of thy hope ! 
Fear not each sudden sound and shock. 
'Tis of the wave and not the rock, 
'Tis but the flapping of the sail, 
And not a rent made by the gale ! 
In spite of rock and tempest's roar. 
In spite of false lights on the shore, 
Sail oh, nor fear to breast the sea! 
Our hearts, our hopes are all with thee; 
Our hearts, our hopes, onr prayers, our tears, 
Our faith triumphant o'er our fears, 
Are all with thee— are all with thee! " 



THE MAGNIFICENT PRESENT. 

AN ADDRESS BY HON. HENRY CHAPMAN, 

DELIVERED AT DOYLESTOWN, PA., JULY 4tH, 1876. 

Friends and Fellow-Citizens : I ought not to occupy this chair 
without returning niy thanks for the honor conferred upon me ; 
for the occasion will be memorable in the annals of the future, 
and harmonizes with the impulses of the sincerest patriotism. 
This day, above and beyond all other days, challenges a retro- 
spect of the past, extending back to that period when this now 
mighty nation in its infancy bade defiance to the sceptre of a 
foreign power, and invites a review of the unprecedented strides 
since then made from year to year in the advancement of the 
arts and sciences, manufactures, education and population. 
And after such a review, we reach the present hour — the mag- 
nificent present — when the happy millions of this broad land, 
which stretches from ocean to ocean, are assembling without dis- 
tinction of race, of country, of profession or occupation, of creed 
or of party, to seal, with the impress of gratitude, the immortal 
work of the sages and heroes who have long slumbered in their 
graves. We cannot, if we would, close our eyes to the contrast 
which is presented between the scene that lowered over the in- 
fant struggles of this country and that which is now unfolded 
to our view. He who visits the great International Exhibition, 
near at hand, will have displayed to his vision the various pro- 
ductions which the rivalry of nations has brought together from 
all parts of the globe — they come from every zone — from the 
mainland and the islands of the sea, and from realms which 
were in their prime when this continent was unnoticed in the 
pages of history and not found on the map of the world. He 
will, also, behold the productions and handiwork of his own fel- 
low citizens, and there will be enough and more than enough in 
the display to fill his heart with a glow of patriotic pride. Wliile 
thus hastily glancing at the past and the present, we may in- 



ADDRESS HENRY CHAPMAN. 75 

dulge in some contemplations and aspirations as to the future. 
Such have been the astonishing developments in all material pro- 
gress during the century, and in so short a period, compared* 
with the ages that have rolled through the archway of time 
that our astonishment is excited and we are prone to wonder 
how it was that the human intellect, during those ages, lay dor- 
mant, and failed to exert itself in the multifarious paths which 
have since been so successfully and triumphantly trodden. But 
our wonder subsides when we remember that a man is only an 
agent of a higher power, which governs him as it does times and 
seasons, and selects them. We are almost inclined to be per- 
suaded that the genius of invention has reached its highest ac- 
complishment in contributing its aid to the various pursuits of 
mankind; but one may recollect that long, long ago it was thought 
by the wisest men its greatest achievements had been attained. 
This fallacy has been exploded, and therefore we may not say 
we have arrived at the summit of human progress. But while 
we may advance and transcend the limits of what has been de- 
monstrated to be practicable, we must remember that we have 
something else to do. We are bound to cherish what we have 
and the citizens of this great republic must remember that they 
are charged by every obligation of patriotism to maintain and 
perpetuate the liberties and rights of all. The universal assem- 
blage this day throughout the land is an encouraging omen; 
and happy be the man and grateful be the man who has lived to 
see this day. Suchji-d ay c o mesdaukonce in a hundred years ! 
May the next be crowned by virtue, union, peace, liberty, pros- 
perity and happiness — if it be not, it will be alone man's fault. 
For the same glorious sun will shine by day, the same moon and 
stars will shed their beams by night, the same responsive earth 
will revolve in its appropriate sphere, the same refreshing waters 
will flow and ebb, the same seasons will come and pass, and the 
same all-wise, just and merciful God will be over alL 



THE BEACON FIEES OF LIBERTY. 

AN ORATION BY HON. GEORGE LEAR. 

DELIVERED AT DOYLESTOWN, PA., JULY 4:TH, 1876. 

Me. President, Ladies and Gentlemen : When the merchant 
turns his attention to foreign commerce, he designs a craft for 
ocean navigation, and addresses himself to the task of procuring 
sound materials and the most approved plans of naval architec- 
ture. The skeleton of a ship is erected on the stocks, and its 
ribs covered with oak or iron, well secured with bolts, having 
neither flaw nor blemish. The hull is finished with all the qual- 
ities of strength and symmetry, and, upon an appointed day, in 
the presence of invited guests, with a virgin stationed on the 
bow with a bottle containing something similar " to the nectar 
which Jupiter sips," the hawsers are cast loose, the blocks and 
wedges are removed, and as the ponderous craft glides down 
the inclined plane, the bottle is broken as the name is pro- 
nounced in baptismal solemnity, and, with a rush and a plunge, 
she enters the water, and floats high upon its surface, uncon- 
trolled and uncontrollable except by extrinsic agencies. 

But being in its proper element, the next care is to fit it for 
navigation by the addition of masts and spars, booms and yards, 
ropes and sails, until the unmanageable hulk becomes a full 
rigged ship, with her sails bent and her pennons flying, and 
" she walks the water like a thing of life." Friends are again 
invited, viands are prepared, and the trial excursion takes place. 
She sails gaily down the bay to the strains of inspiring music, 
the sails swell with the freshening breeze, and the pennons wave 
graceful in the wind as she approaches the waters of the broad 
ocean. Fearlessly she essays the navigation of the biUowy deep 5 
and for the first time she is " afloat on the fierce rolling tide." 
she is pronounced staunch and sea- worthy, and returns to ship 
her first cargo, and enter upon the practical business for which 
she was designed and constructed. 



ORATION — GEORGE LEAR. 77 

One hundred years ago a band of patriots known by the 
name of the Continental Congress, unskilled and inexperienced 
in State craft, with fearless and almost reckless disregard of con- 
sequences, launched their bark upon the unknown and turbu- 
lent sea of revolution. Not lured like Jason by the hope of the 
recovery of the Golden Fleece, or like the merchant by the pros- 
pect of wealth — not investing their private fortunes only in the 
prospect of private gain or personal ambition— but in the cause 
of human freedom and the rights of man they " mutually 
pledged to each other their lives, then fortunes, and then sacred 
honor." It was not the mere question of the sacrifice of a for- 
tune, or, in the event of success, untold wealth. It was the 
launch of the ship of State upon an unknown sea, \fitk fortunes, 
lives and honor aboard, the venture being the establishment of 
a nation based on the principle of human equahty ; or, in the 
event of a failure, the loss of fortune, life and honor. Without 
any prospect of personal gain under any circumstances, the 
stake was a nation to freedom or halters to the projectors. 

After years of untold sacrifices and privations, a nation was 
organized, and human freedom as the basis of a government 
was established. But the mere military success of the Revo- 
lution was not the end. Martial courage, heroic endurance and 
unselfish patriotism could trample kingly crowns in the dust, and 
tear the purple robes from the shoulders of royalty, but the 
destinies of a nation of people, covering almost a continent, 
were left in their hands, with no one born to govern, and with 
no experience in any one in the art of government. 

The ship of State had made a successful trial trip, and had 
weathered the gale of military contention and strife; but her 
crew was composed of men accustomed to obey and not to rule. 
The nations of the earth pronounced her staunch and sea- 
worthy, and recognized her as a co-ordinate existence. But the 
question constantly recurred, can she sustain herself in mid- 
ocean in the long voyage of national existence, with an untrained 
and undeciplined crew, in the calms of financial depression, and 
among the rocks and shoals of mutiny and internal dissen- 
sion ? We are here to-day, as a portion of the passengers who 
sailed on that good craft, to answer that question. We have 






78 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

withstood the shock of battle, the ocean's storm, the tropic's 
calm, "the broadside's reeling rack," the crew's rebellion, and 
the hidden dangers of the deep, and with all hands on deck and 
the flag flying at the fore, we dance over the waves and ride intc 
the harbor at the end of a voyage of a hundred years, with the 
ease and grace of excursionists on a summer sea. 

With all our opening disadvantages, with fortunes broken and 
general financial prostration, the nation entered upon a career 
of self-government, then a doubtful experiment, and this is the 
only republic in the history of the world which has lived to cel- 
ebrate the centenary of its birth. The problem of government 
by the people was looked upon as the fond dream of visionaries 
and theorists designed to captivate the ear of the multitude by 
the resounding periods of the rhetorician, and shed a glamour 
over the resonant numbers of the poet's songs of liberty; but 
practically an impossible hope not to be realized in human 
society. 

When the united colonies struck their blow for independence 
and in the cause of human freedom, the population of the whole 
country was not equal to that of Penns3'lvania to-day. And in 
useful productions and the multifarious industries which render 
a people self-sustaining, they were far behind the present re- 
sources of this great State. They were not only dependent 
politically upon the mother country, and governed by laws 
in the enactment of which they had no voice, but they were 
commercially dependent. They depended on other countries 
for many of the necessaries of life. They had a vast territory 
and a soil of great natural fertility, but its products had to be 
shipped to other countries to be put into the forms and fabrics 
for the use of the people. Under such circumstances, the de- 
claration of independence was an act like that of a commander 
landing his army on a hostile coast, and burning his ships to cut 
off the possibility of retreat. It was a bold act, but it was not 
done recklessly, under a temporary excitement, by men who 
were ambitious to perform a dramatic act of evanescent courage 
before the eyes of the world, but by men who were brave, pru- 
dent, patriotic and wise. 

There is a system of compensation which runs through all 



ORATION GEORGE LEAR. 79 

human transactions, and it often happens that what seems an 
element of weakness is a bulwark of strength. The comparative 
poverty and helpless dependence of the colonies was a bond of 
union and strength when the connection with Great Britain was 
once severed. Having to rely upon themselves, they became 
more firmly knitted together, and this self-dependence increased 
their trust and confidence in each other. While their priva- 
tions were greater, their patriotism burned the brighter, and 
they vied with each other in acts of unselfish heroism, and in 
the darkest hours of the protracted struggle, the gloom was 
illuminated by deeds of fortitude, endurance and valor which 
filled the land with their glory, and challenged the admiration 
of the world. 

But this is not a time nor a place for a history of that war, 
or a recapitulation of its conspicuous events. The pledge of 
the colonists to each other and to mankind was faithfully re- 
deemed. The scattered colonies became the nucleus of a great 
nation. But war leaves its scars as well upon the body pohtic 
as upon the warrior. The new government was bankrupt. 
The currency of the country was worthless. The new system 
of government was to be organized by men who were without 
experience in the art of government, with large debts and an 
empty treasury. Here again, more conspicuously than in the 
war, the poverty of the colonists was an element of strength, 
and the nursury of patriotism. With no money in the treasury 
and few resources to raise revenue to pay their debts and carry 
on the public business, they had their compensation in the fact 
that there was nothing to steal, and consequently the new gov- 
ernment did not beget a race of thieves. Men who were con- 
spicuous for the purity of their fives, their sterling integrity and 
patriotism and their exalted abilities were sought for and placed 
in the highest positions of political trust. In those days, it was 
the belief of the people that the true way to get money was to 
earn it; that the acquisition of wealth was a slow and toilsome 
process; and that the evidence of it was the possession and own- 
ership of substantial property, or the glittering cash, and not a 
man's ability to place on the market and keep afloat the largest 
amount of commercial paper. 



80 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

With these homely but sound notions of political and per- 
sonal economy, the people addressed themselves to the task of 
repairing their fortunes and building up the industries of the 
country on a firm and substantial bases. Economy in the 
household and in the government was the rule, and no luxuries 
were indulged in until the money was earned to pay for them. 
The habits of the people under a government of and by the peo- 
ple stamped their impress upon the administration of public af- 
fairs. Honesty, economy, and public and private virtue were 
essential elements of respectability, and the general rule of 
action in pubhc and private life ; and proffiigacy the excep- 
tion. Cultivating such principles, with a boundless territory, 
of teeming soil and a free government, we could not fail to be a 
prosperous and a happy people. 

" There is no poverty where Freedom is — 
The wealth of nature is affluence to us all," 

Having started our ship of State under these auspices, we 
have tided over the first century of our national existence. 
On this glad day of our hundredth anniversary, while celebra- 
ting the most important event in the history of human govern- 
ments which has ever shed its influence on surrounding nations, 
and lighted up the dark places of the world, let us like true 
sailors take our reckoning, and improve the occasion of our re- 
joicing in this year of jubilee, by ascertaining whether our good 
ship is on her true course, and to so trim her sails, repair her 
hull, lay her fairly before the wind, and replenish her stores, 
that she may live through the calms of financial and business 
depressions, weather the gales of internal strife, avoid the rocks 
and shoals of foreign and domestic wars, and repel the attacks of 
all piratical crafts at home and abroad, during the future pro- ' 
gress of her voyage over an unexplored and unknown sea; for 
our future course is not to be a return, and we are not to he 
listlessly on the water to be borne back by the refluent tide to 
the harbor whence we sailed. Our course is not backward but 
forward and onward. 

And what are the conclusions from our observations ? "What 
do the soundings indicate ? What is the outlook from the bin- 
acle? Does the gallant craft still respond to the turn of the 



ORATION GEORGE LEAK. 81 

helmsman's wheel like a thing of intelligence ? Do the " waves 
bound beneath her like a steed that knows his rider ? " Is she 
followed by hungry sharks ready to devour her crew, or cheered 
by the presence of the graceful sea gull, with his wavy motion 
and virgin plumage ? 

These questions are asked more to excite reflection than for 
answers; but it may not be amiss to answer so far as can be 
done by general conclusions. The stability of the present and 
the hope of the future are found in the underlying principles of 
our governments— the universal equality and inalienable rights 
of all men. Human rights are the rights of all men, and of each 
man, and they cannot be taken away except so far as he surrenders 
them. Governments are organized for the protection of human 
society, but they derive all " then- just powers from the con- 
sent of the governed."' To this extent a man may surrender 
his natural rights. The government is from an internal, and 
not an external source. Man rules himself under our system, 
and for convenience may do it by a delegated power, to be con- 
ferred and resumed at stated intervals. His laws, therefore, are 
of his own making, and while it is his duty as a member of soci- 
ety to obey them, he has the power of revocation whenever he 
finds them unjust or oppressive. 

Under such a form of government, the light of armed revo- 
lution does not exist. That is only justifiable against a power 
which he did not create, and which seeks to control or disegard 
his rights without his consent. The theory of govern ment 
based upon an hereditary succession of rulers is not only sub- 
versive of the rights of man, but is an irreverent usm-pation of 
divine power. The nurture of a sovereign in the cradle, des- 
tined while a puling infant to be the ruler of a nation, whether 
an idiot, a tyrant, a statesman, or a fool, is as impious as it is 
absurd. In organized society man is the source of political 
power for self-government, although we all acknowledge "a 
higher law ; " and however much the term may be abused by 
speculative theorists, and however much the expression may be 
distorted by or in the interests of political mountebanks, all 
jurists and law makers recognize a law above human laws, the 
leges legem, to which all human laws must conform and be made 



82 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

subservient. But that law does not take away any human rights. 
It fosters and protects thern ; and, therefore, it cannot confer 
the right to rule on hereditary sovereigns. And this principle 
of equality in rights is universal, and applies to all men, with- 
out regard to nationality, creed or color. Whether Caucasian, 
Teuton, Celt, African, or Mongolr n, this question is equally 
applicable, and it cannot be abrogated by any power beneath 
that which thundered the laws from Mount Sinai. Man may 
forfeit his right to life and liberty by his crimes, but this can be 
done only by the laws in which he has a voice in making. The 
stability of the present and the hopes of the future are based 
upon the maintenance of this principle in its integrity ; but it 
is so firmly seated and so interwoven with every fibre of our 
existence, that the faith and the hope seem to be well founded. 

While it is true that there does not seem to be that rigid econ- 
omy, and unselfish patriotism which characterized the founders 
of the government, I do not belong to the croakers who believe 
that all public and private virtue, wisdom and patriotism died 
with the past. It is an unfortunate disposition, and leads to 
much unhappiness, to be constantly distrusting every one in 
public and in private life. I would prefer to be occasionally 
cheated rather than deal with every man as if I believed him to 
be a rogue. Under our system, the government will be as good 
as the people, and the evils which creep into the administration 
of public affairs begin at the root. 

People and rulers have departed to some extent from that 
simplicity which should be the characteristic of a republic ; and 
by extravagance and luxury — if not riotous living — indulge in 
expenditures and incur heavy liabilities, to meet which they in- 
dulge in speculation, and essay to make money of each other, 
where there is no money, their efforts to grow rich by a short 
and rapid process result in bankruptcy. They then blame the 
government, and clamor for legislation to cure the evil, when 
they can get none from that source. Their remedy is in their 
own hands, and no where else ; but public officials and ambi- 
tious men speculate upon their anxiety, flatter their hopes, 
spend their money and lead them astray. In one view, the 
people give too much attention to their government. In anoth- 



ORATION — GEORGE LEAR. 83 

er, not enough. They depend too much upon the government 
to mend their broken fortunes. They give too little attention 
to the kind of men they select, and depend too much upon 
creeds and platforms. 

The evil will go on until it will cure itself in the end. I can 
lay down a rule which, if rigidly followed, would cure many of 
the evils which are now charged upon the government. Let 
every man attend diligently to his own business. Earn the 
money upon which he lives, and earn it before he expends it. 
Risk no money in a speculation which he cannot afford to lose, 
and place none in a doubtful venture but his own. If this 
course be strictly followed by every man, we will scarcely know 
we have a government, it will sit so lightly upon our shoulders, 
and we will soon discover that our business and our fortunes 
do not depend so much upon the government as upon our- 
selves. There are more people than is generally supposed who 
pursue this course ; but they are very much hindered in their 
slow but certain progress by the large class who pursue a dif- 
ferent course. Men who spend money they never earned, or 
owned, must spend that which belongs to others. For many 
live on what others have toiled to earn. This is one of the great 
causes of the crippled condition of the industries of our State. 

But while these things retard our prosperity periodically, 
they do not shake the foundation principles of our government, 
or endanger its permanency. The wrecks which float upon the 
surface are but the broken fragments of the argosies which 
have been drawn into the insatiate whirlpool of mad specula- 
tion, dashed in pieces on the rocks beneath, and cast up by the 
restless waters, a warning to reckless adventurers. 

The system of fast living and the appropriation of trust funds 
for private use, which ultimately leads to the theft of public 
money, are the crying evils of the times. While bolts, and bars, 
and locks can protect us against common thieves and burglars, 
we have no security against official thieves except care in the 
selection of men for official positions of trust and confidence, 
and the rigid and inexorable enforcement of the law against its 
infractors, with a merciless punishment of criminals who betray 
their trusts. And the country is waking up to the importance 



84 OUK NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

of this subject and a better era is dawning. " It is always the 
darkest the hour before day." 

But this particular manifestation of crime is not peculiar to 
our times, and does not touch the fundamental principles of our 
government. 

The Great Master was betrayed for a bribe, but Christianity 
still lives ; there was treason in the army of the Revolution, and 
yet the colonists triumphed ; and there have been defaulters 
among public officials and corruption in high places in all ages 
of the world. In our country the remedy against it is in the 
hands of the people. In nearly all others they have little, if 
any, control over the public servants. There is, therefore, no 
reason to despair of our institutions in view of certain mani- 
festations of corruption among those in positions of trust and 
confidence. When the crime becomes intolerable the people 
will rise to the necessity of the occasion, and apply the remtdy 
which they hold in their hands. 

But the question arises, are we in a worse condition in this 
respect than we were in what we regarded as the palmy days of 
the Republic? We have more facilities for obtaining news 
than formerly. With our telegraphs and railroads, news travels 
with great rapidity, and especially bad news ; and our innumer- 
able newspapers gather that which is the most sensational and 
exciting. The quiet deeds of charity and benevolence, the self- 
sacrificing act of heroism, and the thousands of events in private 
life which ennoble human actions are unknown to the public. 
The turbulent elements of society come to the surface. The 
agents of crime get into the courts, and their deeds are 
heralded everywhere, and newspapers containing the revolting 
details are constantly thrust before our eyes. " The evil that 
men do lives after them ; the good is oft interred with their 
bones." We hear and read all that is evil, but little of the 
good. 

And when we take into consideration the difference in the 
j>opulation of this country between this day and a hundred years 
ago, being a difference of at least twelve to one, and the fact 
that evil makes more noise in proportion than the good, it be- 
comes a very doubtful question whether criminals and crimes 



ORATTON — GEORGE LEAR. 85 

have more than kept pace with the population. That certain 
offenses against law have assumed a grave magnitude is a thing 
to be deplored, but in the presence of the good whicli emanates 
from oiu' beneficent government they are but as the spots on the 
disk of the sun, which mellow the light by breaking the fierce 
rays of its overpowering effulgence. 

But there is no reason to believe that the world is retrograd- 
ing in morals or honesty. Such a concession would be an ad- 
mission that civilization, intelligence and Christianity impede 
the progress of the world and are disadvantageous to mankind ; 
for there are more schools and seminaries, more books to read; 
more people to read and understand them, more acts of benev- 
olence and charity, more culture and refinement, and more peo- 
ple who worship God to-day than at any other period since the 
" morning stars sang together " at man's creation. That there 
are base, gross and wicked people is no new phenomenon. 
They have infested society and cursed the world since the 
day when our original progenitor partook of " that forbidden 
fruit whose mortal taste brought death into the world and all 
our woe, with loss of Eden." 

But the beacon fires of liberty burn as brightly to-day as they 
did on the morning of the Fourth of July, 1770, and the people 
of the country cherish the principles upon which the brave old 
patriots of that day established us as a free and independent 
nation. This morning has been ushered in over this broad land 
«vith the booming of cannon, the chimes of bells, the blare of 
the bugle, and the joyful greetings and proud huzzas of the peo- 
ple. These demonstrations are hearty, earnest and profound. 
They are the spontaneous outbursts of patriotism — the grand 
anthems bursting from the full hearts of a free, loyal and intel- 
ligent people. 

Why should we not look forward to the future with well- 
founded hopes, inspired by the success of the past? The staunch 
ship of State cannot encounter more difficult navigation in the 
coming century than in the past. She has encountered foes 
from without and enemies within. She has lain within the 
trough of the sea, and withstood the earth-shaking broadside ; 
and while she trembled in every timber and groaned throughout 



86 OUK NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

her hull at the " diapason of the cannonade," after the blue 
smoke of battle had drifted away in curling clouds on the breeze, 
we looked aloft, and joyfully exclaimed that " our flag is still 
there !" When the waves of rebellion, with fearful fury crashed 
upon her in mid-ocean, they were broken and scattered in foam 
on her hull, and died away in eternal silence at her keel. In 
calm and storm, in peace and war, our goodly craft has braved 
a hundred years " the battle and the breeze." 

To-day all hands are piped on deck to receive instructions and 
inspiriting encouragement for a continuance of the voyage for an- 
other century. The winds and tides are fair, the skies are 
bright, and the sails are set. Gently swaying to the billows' 
motion, we round the headland, and boldly enter upon the broad 
expanse of waters. The world of old dynasties, which jeered 
when we essayed our first voyage, became astonished at our pro- 
gress, and their astonishment turned into amazement as we pur- 
sued our successful course. That amazement, as we boldly head 
out for the open sea on the second century, assumes the aspect 
of awe. Such a craft, manned by such a crew, carrying a Hag 
which is known and recognized as the emblem of freedom every- 
where, is a dangerous emissary among the subjects of kings, em- 
perors, and despots of every form. Wherever that flag floats, 
whether waving languidly in the gentle zephyr of the tropics, or 
fluttering amid the ice crags of arctic desolation, it is hailed as 
the emblem of freedom and the symbol of the rights of man. 

To show our influence on the people in the remote corners of 
the earth, a citizen of the United States, during the trying times 
of the rebellion, was traveling on the northern coast of Norway ; 
and, landing from a small steamer at a trading town in the early 
morning, before the inhabitants were astir, found three fisher- 
men from Lapland waiting at the door of a store to do some 
small business in trade. The fishermen appeared to be a father 
and two sons. They were dressed in skins of the reindeer, and 
appeared to be half barbarian, illiterate people. They were in- 
troduced to the American, and when the elder of the Laplanders 
learned that the distinguished stranger was a citizen of this 
country, his countenance lighted up with an expression of eager 
intelligence as he asked : " Are you from beyond the great sea?" 



ORATION — GEOKGE LEAR. 87 

Upon being answered in the affirmative, lie exclaimed : " Tell 
me, tell me, does liberty still live?" He expressed great satis- 
faction upon being assured that it did. 

If on the coasts of the northern frozen seas, in a land of al- 
most perpetual night, an illiterate fisherman feels such an eager 
interest in the question of the continued vitality of liberty, what 
a dangerous messenger will be that ensign of the Ship of State 
flashing " its meteor glories " among the thrones, crowns, and 
sceptres of the world. The subjects and victims of oppression will 
catch " inspiration from its glance," and learning that liberty 
still lives, will pass the inspiring watchword from man to man. 
And the cry that " Liberty still lives " will be the world's battle 
shout of freedom, and the rallying watchword of deliverance. 

" And the dwellers in the rocks and in the vales, 
Shall shout it to each other, and the mountain tops 
Prom distant mountains catch the flying joy, 
'Till na.tiou after nation taught the strain, 
Earth rolls the rapturous hosanna round." 

And in the land of liberty's birth the fires of patriotism will 
be kept aflame by the iteration and reiteration of the answer to 
the fisherman's question, that " Liberty still lives." And from 
the hearts of the crowded cities, from the fireside of the farmer, 
and from the workshop of the mechanic, in the busy hamlets of 
labor, and in the homes of luxury and ease, the hearts of free- 
men will be cheered as our noble craft sails on, with the inspirit- 
ing assurance that " Liberty still lives." The burden of that cry 
will float upon the air wherever our banner waves, and its re- 
sonant notes will fill the land with a new inspiration as the joy- 
ful assurance is heard. 

" Coming up from each valley, flnng down.from each height) 
Our Country and Liberty, God for the right." 



THE MATCHLESS STORY- 

AN ORATION BY HON. JOHN OBYKNE. 

DELIVERED AT WILMINGTON, DEL., JULY 4th, 1876. 

Mr. Mayor, Councilmen, Citizens and Ladies : One hun- 
dred years have corne and gone — and in some land the 
waves of time have left no impress. Not so with us. A 
century ago what were we ? To-day what are we ? "We were 
then 3,000,000 of people, we are now over 40,000,000. What 
does this mean, what wondrous national tale is this ? Is it not 
a mistake. In all the annaled past the story is matchless. Go 
back to the frontier line of fact and fable, begiu at the misty 
border which marks the boundary of exact knowledge, and cull 
out the most extraordinary stories of national progress ; par- 
allel them with our tale of a century ; and how dry and insipid 
are they, how deficient in dramatic force, how slow and limping 
in gait, how denuded of the element of human happiness, when 
compared with the marvellous and beneficent growth of our 
Republic ? 

The glamor of history is thrown around a Cyrus, a Leoni- 
das, a Miltiades, an Alexander, a Charlamagne, or Napoleon, 
and the glowing mind of the student, drinks in the glory of 
their career as they rise up in demigod proportions to the 
imagination. Their glories are written in the blood sweat and 
woe of the conquered. The wail of the captive is heard as the 
cadenced answer to the shout of triumph. Herein our history 
differs from that of all others. Our growth is wreathed and en- 
twined with men's well-being and woman's exaltation. It is a 
poem of happiness conferred, not of suffering endured. This 
alone makes our career a blessed one among all the people. 

Upon the border land of the Atlantic, bounded by the coast 
range, or the Alleghany and Appalachian mountains, three mil- 
lions of chosen people dwelt a hundred years ago. They were 
a chosen people, culled from the best blood of the Norman, 



ORATION JOHN o'bYRNE. 89 

Saxon, and Celt, men whose conscience were their only moni- 
tors, whose ingrained sense of equality was crystalized in the 
answer of the New England leader, that " he knew no Lord, but 
the Lord Jehovah." In this fringe of our continent there were 
no castelated towers, no ivy-crowned turrets, no baronal keeps* 
no gothic churches, whose foundations were laid in the gloaming 
of the Myen age ; all was new. The compacts of the Puritan 
Mayflower, and the Catholic Dove, resting upon the great char- 
ter of John, wei e palladium of American rights. Mighty was 
the power of these compacts and charters, as they gave to the 
world a republic, which has already overshadowed in freedom, 
might, glory and prosperity all the political creations of man 
and compared with the sheen of which all others are opaque. 

This is seemingly exaggerated, but it is not so. England is 
held to be the foremost in the race of progressive national de- 
velopment. A century ago, the fishermen, farmers and planters, 
of this land met her, beat her, trailed her nag in the mire of 
Saratoga and Yorktown. She was then triple our population 
— with the gates of India, the Spice Islands, and the pearly 
Orient open, through which untold wealth was poured into her 
exchequer, with the German and Sclave tributaries to her in- 
dustries. She is now 30,000,000— we are now 40,000,000. 

Of the great drama of the Revolution I will not speak, it is 
the sunniest and brightest spot in history, its triumphs are 
jewels, fit companions for those contests which saved our 
Japethic civilization from Semetic barbarism, a civilization 
thrice endangered by the Persian, the Carthagenian, and the 
Saracen. Our municipal life was eaily freighted with a precious 
cargo; onward, through the passes of the Alleghanies, the pre- 
cious burden is carried. The riven pathways are avenues 
through which the founders of more than Imperial States have 
passed. The Ohio valley swarm with frontier men, the resonant 
axe., the muffled rumble of the wagon, the curling smoke of the 
settlement, the tapping of the woodpecker, warn the huntsman 
and trapper that settlers with customs codified into law have 
occupied their haunts, — and their tents and wigwams must be 
carried onward to the Mississippi, across its rich valleys, over 
sage desert and rugged peak, up and beyond the back-bone of 



90 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

the continent, through the ice passes of the Sierra Nevada, to 
be met with voyagers who defied alike the rage of the Atlantic 
and the wrath of the Pacific, to find a home in the Eldorado of 
our western shores. We have tamed the continent; — at least our 
allotted part is subservient to man's interest — and therein the 
laborer who garners the yellow harvest is recompensed with its 
profits. Not unmixed prosperity and peace have been ours — 
the rose had thorns and sorely they pricked us. A war for 
political existence was waged in the infancy of the Republic. 
Jackson and New Orleans are the magic words which briefly 
tell the story of its ending. The arts of peace, with the spo- 
radic exceptions of Indian warfare, dominated and directed the 
destinies of the Republic for a whole generation after the vic- 
tory of January, 1815. The brief, brilliant and profitable epis- 
ode of the Mexican war enlarged our territorial domain, and 
enshrined the jewels of the Pacific in the quartering^ of our 
flag. A few little years, and the heavens grew dark — the mighti- 
est civil war of recorded history was fought. Blood rained 
upon battle fields, but did not for long. The geographical unity 
of the country was preserved by the surrender at Appotomax. 
The old Roman forbade the preservation of any relic or flag 
which told of a war between Roman and Roman ; no record of 
civil strife was permitted, and it was wise. Let us imitate the 
wisdom of the ancients, and pledge ourselves here, upon this 
joyous, glorious day, in the face of God and our country, to 
bury the dead past, to preserve no recollection of the works of 
those dark daj s, but hand in hand, heart to heart, soul to soul, 
march forward with unity of purpose, to enlarge the prosperity, 
garner the glory, increase the intelligence, deepen the patriot- 
ism, and render more enduring than an Egypt pyramid, our 
Republic ; the sanctuary of right, freedom, and order. 

One hundred years ago, around the old State House in Phil- 
adelphia, were gathered no denser crowd than now here, then 
as now — the declaration of independence was read. It was then 
to be sustained by serried columns of armed men, now by the 
votes of unarmed freemen. The grim and bloody visage of war 
has unruffled its frowns and scars, and the halcyon smiles of 
peace now wreath the same brow ; but peace has its duties, as 
well as war, and their performances are sternly demanded. 



ORATION — JOHN o'BTRNE. 91 

"Within the old State House sat the Continental Congress — its 
story is too well known to need repetition. To-day in the same 
city, the greatest Congress of the Nations ever before assembled, 
holds high council. It is not a congress of a race, or a nation ; 
it is gathering together of all the tribes and peojnes, whom 
God scattered upon the plains of Shinaar, for impious defiance 
of his power 

Although diverse in speech, with Babel's confusion upon every 
tongue, yet the threshold of unification has been reached, and an 
acknowledgment by all mankind, from the Malay, Mongolian, 
Hindostan, Persian, Turk and Arab, as well as from our cog- 
nate races, that all are brothers, the children of a common 
father, friendly rivals in the race for human perfection has been 
had amid the hossanahs of song, and the roar of cannon. God 
save the Republic ! 



THE OPEN BIBLE; OE, TOLERANT CHRISTIANITY. 
The Source and Security of American Freedom and Progress, 

AN ORATION— BY HON. COURTLANDT PARKER, 

DELIVERED AT NEWARK, N". J., JULY 4TH, 1876. 

This is our year of Jubilee. A hundred years have rolled 
away since the Declaration of our Independence as States, and 
the formation of the confederacy which ripened into nationality: 
but little more than two hundred years since the earliest wan- 
derers " not knowing whither they went," ignorant whether to 
hope or to despair, left the shallops upon which they had braved 
the ocean, and sought upon this continent a new home. 

One hundred years ! The life-time of some few men. Some 
child born this moment may see the recurrence of a century. 
But how brief a portion is it of the life of most nations ! In the 
days of Pericles, Athens had existed over one thousand years. 
Almost seven hundred intervened between the birth of Augus- 
tus Caesar and the building of Rome. The census of the great 
city thirty years before the Christian Era, made its population 
4,000,000 souls. Sixteen hundred years comprise the life-time of 
Egypt from its foundation until Cambyses became its conqueror, 
while from the union of the Kingdoms of Great Britain under 
the name of England, until the birth of Shakespeare, was over 
seven hundred years ; from thence till now, more than three 
hundred more. The greatness of America attained in one hun- 
dred years, judged by the ordinary tests of national progress, 
can perhaps best be appreciated by such a brief summary, ex- 
hibiting at a glance the time required for the development of 
other Empires, in contrast with that taken for our own. 

The century over which we rejoice has been one of rare devel- 
opement in every quarter, and in every field of human progress. 
Think of the events which have distinguished it. That establish- 
ment of separation from the mother country which we wrongly 
term the war of the Revolution ; the rightly called Revolution of 



ORATIOl^— COllRTLAttDT r-ARKER. 93 

France ; the wars succeeding, which devastated Europe, and 
illustrated the career of the greatest captain of the world; the sin- 
gular, romantic and varying life of his distinguished nephew, 
passing from a prison to a throne, and thence to inglorious flight 
and death in luxurious exile ; the rise of the great Russian Empire 
from almost barbarism to the second station among civilized 
nations ; the creation of Australia ; the almost new creation of 
Italy ; the subjugation, complete, though sudden, of France to 
Germany ; as sudden and more complete than when the brave 
and adventurous Henry the Fifth brought to his knees the French 
monarch of his day at the bloody field of Agincourt ; the roman- 
tic conquest of Mexico by our own arms ; the strange revelation 
and settlement of California ; and springing from or at least con- 
nected with it the stupendous Civil War through which we our- 
selves have passed, with its momentous consequences to us, to 
the race so long enslaved among us, to all mankind, in that it 
has demonstrated the inherant toughness of Democracy, and re- 
vealed that we are a Nation which, if it may crumble, can never 
be overcome or fall ; all these and many more historical events 
have distinguished this great century and made it most remark- 
able of all which the world has ever seen. The man whose life 
spans it, has beheld more stupendous changes than were ever 
crowded before within so short a time. 

It cannot be fairly aUeged that the century past excells its pre- 
decessors in individual, intellectual or moral development. Know- 
ledge has been widely diffused, and in certain directions greatly 
increased. But it is not the era of great men, of deepest and 
most powerful thinkers. It seems as if diffusion was almost in- 
consistent with depth. The distinction of the age is in discovery, 
more than in thought. But in this region, namely, that of ma- 
terial discovery, the deeds of the century have been even more 
remarkable than its political history. Who can enumerate them ? 
Invention has been most prolific and successful, revolutionizing 
the methods and laws of life and action everywhere. In war, 
the clumsy firelock and insignificant though awe-inspiring ord- 
nance of 1776 have given place to the breach-loader, the revolver, 
the chassepot and needle-gun, the mitrailleuse, the rifle cannon, 
the huge columbiad and other mighty weapons, whose roar 



94 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

makes that which appalled our forefathers seem nothing m com- 
parison, while fortifications once impregnable are now regarded 
as utterly and absurdly unavailing. The " wooden walls of Eng- 
land '' have come to be despised. A Yankee contriver produced a 
contemptible naval " cheese-box '' whose marvelous success, both 
for offense and defense, has thrown doubt on the utility of ordin- 
ary ships, and art is now seeking in submarine navigation and 
the use of torpedo boats the means of naval attack and defense. 
It is through war that nations attain Peace, and to-day the art 
of war is not simply revolutionized ; it is positively mystified ; 
taught to distrust everything it knows, groping for some dis- 
covery or invention by which to contend successfully with the in- 
ventions which have made old schemes and weapons ridiculous. 

In agriculture, methods and means are entirely changed. 
True, the old plans remain. Virgil's Georgics may stiU instruct 
the farmer. The plow, the harrow, the spade, the hoe, the scythe, 
the flail and the sickle still remain. But with these ancient im- 
plements, the reaper, the mower, the planter, the thresher, and a 
host of other labor-savers have largely done away with personal 
toil, whilst chemistry and science have made the earth teem with 
strange fertility, and the art of gardening has furnished its vo- 
taries with the power of almost creation. 

In medicine and surgery the progress of the century is per- 
haps most remarkable. Vaccination has all but quelled the 
direst of all pestilences. Chemistry has supplied specifics remedy- 
ing in skillful hands almost every chronic disease, while anaes- 
thetics have robbed surgery of its terrors and made operations 
possible and common which before men never dared. The vic- 
tories of medical and surgical skill over disease and death dur- 
iug the wars which have lately scourged Europe and America 
have illustrated a heroism, individual and professional, not ex- 
celled in any age : a devotion to duty and to scientific research 
of which the world may well be proud. 

In mechanics what triumphs have abounded. The perfected 
cotton-gin brought into many times multiplied use as a fabric 
for clothing, warmth and decoration almost unknown before, and 
stimulated an agriculture, the value of which changed the seat 
of empire. But the steam engine — what differences to mankind 



ORATION COURTLANDT PARKER. 95 

have not been produced by its discovery and application. The 
stationary steam engine disembowels the earth or foils fable in 
the multiplication of mechanical production. Applied as a mo- 
tive power it has changed the habits and character of the world. 
The steamboat upon our rivers ; the magnificent steamship defy- 
ing nature and making the ocean its slave ; the locomotive, an- 
nihilating space and time, binding together distant realms and 
opposite oceans, so that no region on earth seems any longer 
foreign ; could imagination picture what would happen were the 
use of steam suddenly lost ? Yet before this century it was not 
known. 

Even more wonderful in its effects upon mankind has been the 
discovery of magnetism and the telegraph. Europe lies iust 
across the road. Its inhabitants are our companions with whom 
we hold daily converse. 

Catalogue a few of the mechanical inventions of this wonder- 
ful century. The steam engine, the telegraph, the photograph, 
the hydraulic press, the repeater, the steamboat, the steamship, 
the locomotive, the diving bell, the rolling mill, the sewing ma- 
chine. In each word what revolutions in Science and Art and 
in the habits of life and society start up before the mind. 

A noticeable fact in regard to most, if not all, these revolution- 
izing inventions is that they were the work either of Englishmen 
or Americans. The progress of the century is mainly due to this 
one branch of the human family, and the same thing is true most 
extensively of minor inventions and discoveries. This may 
be called the Anglo-American century. Other peoples have 
adopted what Englishmen or American have suggested or begun. 
But these have led in the march of society. 

Whence this striking fact ? Whence the prominence, and I 
hesitate not to stay, without stopping more carefully to prove it, 
the superiority of this race of mankind during the century just 
concluded ? It was not always so. Up to the reign of Eliza- 
beth and even to its termination in 1G03, Spain was a greater 
power than England; Spaniards more enterprising as sailors 
and discoverers; more distinguished in the history of the world. 
A hundred years before, three hundred Spaniards had conquered 
Cuba. Some ninety years previous, Cortez had taken Mexico. 



90 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

About the same time, Magellan sailed through the straits which 
bear his name and thus entered the Pacific Ocean. A few years 
later, in 1533, PizaiTO completed his wicked conquest of Peru. 
France at that time was likewise greater than England, and even 
colonized in America with greater energy and earlier. The Em- 
pire of the "Western World was long the prize of doubtful strug- 
gle among these three great nations. Even North America was 
parceUed among them. Florida, named by its Spanish Gover- 
nor in 1512 and only ceded to the United States in 1821, and 
Canada, whose dominion by the French began in 1535 and 
ended in 1759, show by their very names how easily the destiny 
of this land of ours might have been altered. 

Again do we recur to the question, why the prominence dur- 
ing the last century of England and America ? Why their won- 
derful progress, while other nations, greater once than England, 
and far greater than infant America, even when progressive, 
halt and fall behind ? 

I speak of the progress of England during this eventful cen- 
tury, taking it into consideration at the same time with our own. 
It is right and profitable that we do so — it will tend to restrain 
our pride, and if rightly studied, perhaps to give us lessons for 
our future. Let us pause in our consideration of the great 
question proposed, and glance, though but a moment, at the 
mighty structure, the British Empire. 

The area of the British Isles is some 123,000 square miles; 
less than California, or Dakotah, or Montana; not half as large 
as Texas; somewhat over twice as large as the State of New 
York. But the area of aU other British possessions is 3,031,827 
square miles, situate everywhere, so that it is true, without a fig- 
ure, that Britain's morning drum heralds the sun in its progress 
through the world. And this, though our arms wrested from 
Great Britain so much of all the immense country now belong- 
ing to the United States and its territories, conrprising no less 
than 3,014,784 square miles. 

The population of these islands in 1871 was 31,817,108. But 
under their sway, there were besides 208,091,858. In 1780, the 
population of these islands did not exceed 15,800,000. That of 
their possessions certainly then bore no comparison to the num- 
ber existing now. 



ORATION CORTM.NDT PARKER. 97 

The population of the United States, in 1790 was 3,929,214; 
1S70, 38,558,371. The area of the original States was only 
820,680. That of the Union now 3,014,784. 

It were enough for America to be the daughter of such a 
mother. The grandest proof of our progress is the fact that the 
population of the Union to-day exceeds that of the islands of 
Great Britain by some 7,000,000, while one hundred years ti<*o, 
our numbers were scarcely one-fifth of theirs; nearly 12,000,000 
less. 

It were profitless to go farther; to state the material wealth 
of these two great Empires or to show their increase in the cen- 
tury. It is enough to realize the number subject to their do- 
minion — the extent of the world's area over which each rules. 
We come back to the question most interesting, why the prom- 
inence of these two great commonwealths; why their admitted 
eminence in progress during this eminently progressive century ? 

Each owes much to isolation and abundant opportunity; much 
to the blood which flows in the veins of its people; much to the 
civil institutions which have moulded their character, and throu<di 
which, doubtless, both the similarities and differences of Eng- 
lishmen and Americans have been worked out. But we cannot 
fail to observe one striking fact. The impetus of English great- 
ness was given by the generation that settled America. It was 
pushed onwards by the immediately succeeding generations, 
following for the most part the same course of thought and 
practice, and from which, from time to time, successive colonies 
came. The England of to-day is the England first fairly devel- 
oped in the reign of Elizabeth and James, and which has since 
only been modified, never fully changed. The America of to- 
day, departing, I fear, too carelessly from the principles of its 
originators, is yet great and worthy just in proportion as it ad- 
heres to them. To state the view I wish to maintain in short 
compass, it is this: the character and greatness of England and 
America, of Englishmen and Americans, are the result of the 
principles of tolerant Christianity, that is to say, of the open 
Bible and the inculcation of its precepts and doctrines. The free- 
dom of which we rightly boast is better than any other freedom 
because it is that which springs from the open Bible, and is re- 



93 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

verential and dutiful at the same time that it asserts the rights of 
man. The progress over which we celebrate this year of jubilee, is 
due, would we but see it, to the action of those elements of charac- 
ter, which the open Bible, revered and followed as the fathers re- 
vered and foUowed it originates and strengthens — and if we would . 
maintain that progress; if we would have the Nation live more 
centuries; yea! if we would have the next find us a strong, united 
and happy people, we must retain the open Bible as a legal in- 
stitution, insisting upon its use in all education regulated by 
law, and furthering it by all means consistent with law. This 
is the grand subject which I venture this day to suggest. A 
subject, which in fact, one can do little more than suggest, but 
which is super-eminently worthy of the careful thought of the 
distinguished society, a branch of which I have the honor to ad- 
dress in this Centennial year of its establishment. 

The historical allegation that the reigns of Elizabeth and her 
successor date the development or first impetus of English 
greatness, of what peculiarly marks the English character, will 
be, I think, generally accepted. It was indeed a most re- 
markable period. The wars of the Boses had toughened the 
hearts and sinews of the commonalty. The sentiment and habit 
of duty which were the strength and recommendation of the 
Feudal system had increased the native manliness which seems 
inherent in the race. The habit of using martial weapons which 
the law required ; the enforcement of industry ; the punishment 
and contempt of sturdy vagrancy and tramps ; the simplicity 
of diet and of dress ; the strict requisition of honest weights, 
measures and prices, all enforced by statute ; the fierceness in 
fight which won Cressy and Agincourt, the simple-hearted pa- 
triotism which made every man think first of England than 
of himself — these had made a people fit indeed for great 
things. 

Over them ruled the Church. Their information in holy 
story was mainly given by plays and pageants, mystery plays, 
like those still used in Germany, dramas of religion or popular 
legends. Not over five millions of people existed in all Eng- 
land ; their habits of life simple in the extreme. 

Then came the discovery of printing, and in due time the 



ORATION — CORTLANDT PARKER. 99 

printed Bible. First, Tyndale's in 152G to 1536, the mere pos- 
session of a copy of which was its owner's passport to the 
flames; then Myles Coverdale's in 1535, patronized by Lord 
Cromwell ; then Cranmer's, the first Bible published in Eng- 
land, a copy of which in 1540 was required to be placed in 
every Parish Church ; then Whittingham's, Parker's or the 
Bishop's Bible dated 1560 and 1568, and finally the Douay or 
Catholic version in 1609. 

Simultaneously or shortly before these publications which 
mainly effected the English people, properly so called, came the 
outburst of English letters and talent. The lower world was on 
fire ; the upper a series of constellations. In Church and State, 
in Poetry and Drama, hi Philosophy and Statesmanship, in 
voyages and travels, in arts and in arms, the Elizabethan age 
stands grandly eminent, unapproached by aught else in the 
history of mankind. Think of a period, and that when popula- 
tion was so small, that could produce a Bacon, a Shakespeare, 
a Spencer and a Sydney, a Cecil, a Marlowe, a Johnson, a More, 
a Drake, and a Raleigh, besides a crowd of others whom it were 
a pleasure, could we stop to remember. 

But the great feature of the period, especially that ranging 
between the middle of the reign of Elizabeth and the meeting 
of the Long Parliament, was the supremacy attained by the 
Bible. Says an eloquent and graphic writer of modern date, 
" England*bccame the people of a book and that book was the 
Bible." It was as yet the one English book which was familiar 
to every Englishman : it was read at churches, and read at 
home, and everywhere its words as they fell on ears which cus- 
tom had not deadened to their force and beauty, kindled a 
startling enthusiasm. When Bishop Bonner set up the first six 
Bibles in St. Paul's "many well disposed persons used much to 
resort to the hearing thereof, especially when they could get any 
that had an audible voice to read to them." Says an old wri- 
ter, " it was wonderful to see with what joy the book of God 
was received, not only among the learned sort, but generally all 
England over, among all the vulgar and common people : and 
with what greediness God's word was read, and what resort to 
places where the reading of it was ; everybody that could 



100 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

bought the book, or busily read it, or got others to read it to 
them if they could not themselves." 

Quoting again from Mr. Green's history of the English peo- 
ple, "the popularity of the Bible was owing to other causes 
besides that of religion. The whole prose literature of England, 
save the forgotten tracts of "Wyclif, has grown up since the trans- 
lation of the Scriptures by Tyndale and Coverdale. No history 
or romance, no poetry, save the little known verse of Chaucer, 
existed for any practical purpose in the English tongue, when 
the Bible was ordered to be set up in churches. Sunday after 
Sunday, day after day, the crowds that gathered around Bon- 
ner's Bible in the nave of St. Paul's ; or the family group that 
hung on the words of the Geneva Bible in the devotional exer- 
cises at home, were leavened with a new literature. Legends 
and annals, war song and psalm, state rolls and biographies, the 
mighty voices of prophets, the parables of Evangelists, stories 
of mission journeys, of perils by the sea and among tbe heathen, 
philosophic arguments, apocalyptic visions, all were flung broad- 
cast upon minds unoccupied for the most part by any rival 
learning. * * * * As a mere literary monument, 
the English version of the Bible remains the noblest example 
of the English tongue. Its perpetual use made it from the 
instant of its appearance the standard of our language. But 
for the moment its literary effect was less than its social. The 
power of the book over the mass of Englishmen showed itself in 
a thousand superficial ways, and in none more conspicuously, 
than in the influence it exerted on ordinary speech. It formed, 
we must repeat, the whole literature which was practically 
acceptable to ordinary Englishmen, and when we recall the 
number of phrases which we owe to our great authors, the bits 
of Shakspeare or Milton which unconsciously interweave them- 
selves in our ordinary talk, we should better understand the 
strange mosaic of Biblical words and phrases which colored 
English talk two hundred years ago. * * * * But 
far greater than its effect on literature or social phrase, was the 
effect of the Bible on the character of the people at large. 
Elizabeth might silence or tune the pulpits, but it was impossible 
for her to silence or tune the great preachers of justice, and 



ORATION CORTLANDT PARKER. 101 

mercy, and truth which spoke from the book which she had 
again opened for her people. The whole moral effect which is 
produced now-a-days by the religious newspaper, the tract, the 
essay, the lecture, the missionary report, the sermon, was then 
produced by the Bible alone. And its effect in this way, how- 
ever dispassionately we examine it, was simply amazing. The 
whole temper of the nation was changed. A new conception 
of life and of man superseded the old. A new moral and reli- 
gious impulse spread through every class. Literature reflected 
the general tendency of the time. * * * " Theology 
rules there," said Grotius, of England, only ten years after the 
Queen's death. * * * " The whole nation became in fact 
a church." 

Out of all this, and under the action of many wonderful 
changes and providences, upon which we can look now and 
plainly see that the Hand of the Almighty directed, with bluff 
King Harry fighting with the Pope and appealing to the "Word 
against him, his self-will and sensuality thus giving aid to the 
triumph of the open Bible — with lovely Edward piously giving 
himself up to the completion of the Reformation — with Mary 
and Philip fanatically inaugurating persecution and fighting the 
fires of Smithfield and Oxford — with Elizabeth in her turn con- 
tending with Spain, and with the aid of Providence dispersing 
and destroying the great hostile Armada — out of all this, I say, 
was evolved the Puritan — not the grim precisian, morose, 
ascetic, penurious, canting and hyprocritical which that word 
ordinarily calls up and describes, and which, in later years too 
often claimed the title ; but the true and original Puritan, who 
was not necessarily or at first even a separatist, but adhered to 
the Church and its ministers, and sought honestly to reform, not 
to destroy. It was, said Fuller, " a name used to stigmatize 
all those who endeavored in their devotions to accompany the 
minister with a pure heart, and who were remarkably holy in 
their conversation. A Puritan was a man of severe morals, a 
Calvinist in doctrine, and (at last) a non-conformist to all the 
ceremonies and discipline of the Church, though he did not 
wholly separate from it." 

What manner of men and women these were, or might be, 



1()2 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

consistently with this title, the same author from whom I quote 
graphically describes. Of one of them ho chronicles the per- 
sonal beauty which distinguished his youth, taking note from a 
wife's description of him, " of his teeth, even and white as the 
purest ivory, his hair of brown, very thick-set in his youth, 
softer than the finest silk, curling with looue, great rings at the 
end." Serious as was his temper in graver matters, he was 
fond of hawking and piqued himself on his skill in dancing 
and fence. His artistic taste showed itself in a critical love of 
"gravings, sculpture and all liberal arts," as well as in the 
pleasure he took in his gardens, in the improvement of his 
grounds, in plantinggroves, and walks, and fruit trees ! If he 
was diligent in his examination of the Scriptures " he had a 
great love for music, and often diverted himself with a viol, on 
which he played masterly.'' The temper of the Puritan gentle- 
man was just, noble and self-controlled. The larger geniality 
of the ago that had passed away shrank into an intense tender- 
ness within the narrow circle of the home. " He was as kind 
a father," goes on the description already begun, " as dear a 
brother, as good a master, as faithful a friend as tho world had. 
Passion was replaced by manly purity. Neither in youth nor 
ripe years could the fair or enticing woman draw him so much 
as into unnecessary familiarity or dalliance. Wise and virtuous 
women he loved, and delighted in all pure and holy and un- 
blemished conversation with them, but so as never to excite 
scandal cr temptation. Scurrilous discourse even among men 
he abhorred, and though he sometimes took pleasure in wit 
or mirth, yet that which was mixed with impurity he never 
could endorse. The play and willfulness of life, the Puritan 
regarded as unworthy of its character and end. His aim was 
to attain self-command ; to be master of himself, of his thought 
and speech and acts A certain gravity and reflectiveness gave 
its tone to the lightest details of his daily converse with the 
world about him. His temper, quick as might be, was kept un- 
der strict control. In his discourse he was ever on his guard 
against talkativeness or frivolity, striving to be deliberate in 
speech, and ranking the words beforehand. His life was or- 
derly and methodical, sparing of diet and self-indulgence ; he 



OUATIOX CORTLANDT PARKER 103 

rose early ; lie never was at any time idle, and hated to see any 
one else so. The new sobriety and self-restraint marked itself 
even in his change of dress. Gorgeous colors and jewels dis- 
appeared. This no doubt reflected a certain loss of color and 
variety in life itself ; but it was a loss compensated by solid 
gain. Greatest among them was the new conception of social 
equality. Their common call, their brotherhood in Christ, anni- 
hilated in the mind of the Puritans that overpowering sense of 
social distinctions which characterized a preceding age. The 
meanest peasant felt himself ennobled as a child of God. The 
proudest noble recognized a spiritual equality in the poorest 
saint. Of one of the representative men it is written "he had 
a loving and sweet courtesy to the poorest ; he never disdained 
the meanest nor flattered the greatest. 

Such was puritanism among the highest. Alan to it was Pu- 
ritanism among the lower classes. Milton, John Bunyan, Pym, 
Hampden — these names suggest classes from which they sprung 
and show us who they were who laid the foundations of English 
and American greatness. It were delight to dwell upon per- 
sonal descriptions and live awhile among such men and women. 
But it is impossible. We must endeavor to hasten on with the 
subject involved. 

Nor can we stop to show how this sort of people changed; 
how their characteristics exaggerated, intensified, and became 
unnatural; how, in later days, piety became sanctimony; sobrie- 
ty, moroseness; sense of right, tyrannous, self-will; frugality, 
covetousness; virtue, too often hypocrisy; toleration and charity, 
the very incarnation of their original merit, bitter intolerance 
and iron concession of opinion. All this, too true of latest puri- 
tanism, did not belong to the earlier. " It evidently was a natural 
growth under the conditions of contest, legal repression and gen- 
eral conflict to which puritanism was exposed. But it was not 
a necessary one — with judicious treatment, it would have been 
avoided. 

The gardener, seeking successfully to propagate a noble plant, 
chooses the best stock at its healthiest prime, and then selecting 
the most promising bud, fullest of sap and vitality, he severs it, 
and carefully conveying and nursing it, in due time grafts it on 



104 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

some hardy stock, assured that it will permeate and renew it. 
And so the Divine Gardener and Creator selected the exact mo- 
ment when the open Bible had done its noblest work, developed 
and built up the purest, holiest character, and then permitting 
wrongs and conditions likely to effect that object, He directed 
an emigration, a conveying of the best part of England to the 
distant wilderness, there to grow into a nation, like the other, 
yet even more progressive; of a freedom similar though perhaps 
more self-asserting, likely to produce a type of men with more 
active energy than that of those who remained; a nation which, 
daughter of England not only, but a child of England's special 
freedom, the freedom of the open Bible, would take its place be- 
side her as a bulwark of tolerant Christianity, a dispenser through 
all ages of the blessings to mankind which naturally spring 
therefrom. 

No thoughtful man can fail to note the difference between the 
motives which generally brought the first settlers to America 
and those which have actuated other emigration. It was lust of 
gold which led the Spaniard to Mexico and Peru and Cuba and 
elsewhere, mingled with the stern missionary martyr spirit which 
distinguished Jesuit self-sacrifice. It was lust of gold which in 
our day settled California and Austrailia. It was lust of wealth 
and power which made Great Britain mistress of the Indies. 
But with those who from 1610 on to 1700, when large emigra- 
tion well nigh ceased, defied the storms and sought homes in 
America, whence soever they came and with scarce an exception, 
whether from Holland, Sweden, Denmark or England, the mo- 
tive of expatriation was the full enjoyment of the open Bible — 
of the right, that is, to believe, and to act upon their belief, of 
what it teaches; to enjoy th*e freedom of which it tells, and which 
it prompts; a freedom which establishes social equality among 
all men combined with and because of subjection to the will of 
God: a freedom which implies law, self-restraint, love and re- 
gard of one's neighbor, mutual respect among all citizen's; a 
freedom which prompts activity, self-improvement, progress; a 
freedom different in character from that which consists with 
Atheism, Theism or irreligion precisely in that point which has 
made these two nations so progressive, to wit, that man is intrin- 



ORATION CORTLANDT PARKER. 105 

sically so cajiable of elevation that it is liis duty ever to seek it. 

In a word, the freedom here established, and preserved, and 
existing in the mother country by English law, illustrates at 
least in comparison with other nations civilized or barbarous 
which have it not, what is declared by the Divine Founder of 
Christianity: "if the truth therefore shaU make you free, ye 
shall be free indeed." 

I call it " the freedom of the open Bible'" — into which phrase 
enter two great doctrines: first, that it is not, as with many, 
merely a book, however to be admired and comparatively re- 
garded, but the Bible — authoritative, true, supreme — next, that 
it is to be open — open to all, not to be kept for sacerdotal or 
other exposition merely — not to be followed in the way of some 
rather than of others, but for each human being to follow in 
his own way, according to private judgment, with such wis- 
dom as he can acquire and on his own responsibility. Worship- 
ful reverence for the Book, combined with toleration towards 
all who conscientiously follow it, whatever their differences, and 
with pitiful regard to such as conscientiously and respectfully 
impugn it, this is the foundation of the freedom which has done 
such great things for England and for America, and through 
them for the world. 

How in each Nation this fundamental law of the open Bible, 
whose natural product is tolerant Christianity, has been estab- 
lished and preserved, through all the changes and chances of the 
life of nations, is a subject full of interest. In the British Isles 
Puritanism, the first fruits as I have insisted of the open Bible, 
found an established Church, part of the law of the land; a pil- 
lar of the State, and of the Crown: in Scotland following one 
form of sectarian theology, in England another. Strugghng for 
influence within the Church, it found obstacles, and then occur- 
red contention which affected the character of both contestants. 
Antagonism shaped both, and neither party was the better in 
the end. But, for all that, with both the two great blessings re- 
mained: the Bible, in the Church as out of it was the Book, and 
religious belief of every sort was tolerated. True, exceptions to 
this toleration, or at least restrictions, on the manifestations of 
contrary belief, occurred both abroad and here. But this has 



10<> OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

always been temporary and at last rejected, and while we in 
America have always scouted an established Church with a rem- 
nant to-day of the rancor of the fathers against it, we yet may 
doubt whether, without the establishment of Churches in Eng- 
land, Scotland, Holland and other commonwealths, our form of 
Christianity could have been so strong, or civilization and pro- 
gress so advanced and secure. 

For the forces opposed to the open Bible were, and are even 
still, so organized and so supported by civil power, that like or- 
ganization and support were perhaps necessary. The ends of 
Providence, one may almost think he sees, required that England, 
the chosen chief champion of Protestant Christianity and illus- 
tration of its effects, a European power with others to contend 
with or to influence, should be for all these centuries more of a 
monarchy than a republic, while America, afar off, to whom all 
must come over the seas, but with an illimitable future in its im- 
mense area, could with safety at once exemplify that republic- 
anism to which the open Bible leads. And so in the Providence 
of the Most High, there came about for Britain the established 
Churches of the two Kingdoms, combined with their noble Uni- 
versities and schools, while in America the hearts of men were 
led to the establishment of the system of Public Schools, in itself 
and by itself insufficient, except that in them, as every where else, 
there was permitted the open Bible, and except Colleges and 
Universities, developing a higher culture than is possible in 
Public Schools, were consecrated to positive instruction in relig- 
ion. 

It is these great agencies at home and abroad that have done 
the great work of this marvellous century; the Church, the Col- 
lege and the School, all fostered by the Civil Law and shaped 
by Providence with a skill in adaptation equal to that in physical 
culture for the production of the peculiar growths required there 
and here. 

A word more on this topic, tiresome though I may be. The 
distinction of the British Constitution is its composite nature, 
the harmony with which it commingles all three of the known 
forms of government. Its outward strength lies in its aristo- 
cracy which remains in England, though it has perished almost 



ORATION — CORTLANDT PARKER. 107 

everywhere else, and exerts a conservative force whose value can 
hardly be overestimated; especially because it supplies reward 
for merit and exertion, and thus constantly keeps up the exis- 
tence of intellectual ability and strong character. The great- 
ness of Britain is largely due to this. The number of men of 
force and culture there, as well as the extent of culture when it 
exists, is very great. 

And yet it is not difficult to see that this is in a great degree 
the fruit of the Puritanism I have described, the true Puritan- 
ism, earliest offspring of the open Bible. It was this earnest re- 
ligion that created most, if not all, of those numerous endowed 
schools everywhere to be found ; in all of which religious teach- 
ing is a prominent feature, and which are the nurseries of 
Scholarship. From the lowest, meritorious pupils pass as a re- 
ward to some higher, one and from that to some still higher, 
until at last the peculiar few reach Oxford or Cambridge, where 
industry and success reap exalted reward in fellowships, in the 
Church, or even Parliamentary membership. And then pro- 
fessional success and merit are rewarded by office, honor and 
heriditary nobility, so that the aristocracy is constantly renewed 
with a new and vigorous growth — and the race of Englishman 
proper is perpetuated. 

The system estabhshed here under the inspiration of the 
earliest settlers, and wrought into the frame work of our civil 
polity, was calculated to attain like results without repression of 
popular power. It is easy to see how it has shaped American 
characteristics and promoted American individualities. It had, 
like the other, several distinct means. First, the Public School, 
and in it always and everywhere and originally as a means of in- 
struction, the open Bible. Second, Endowed Schools, Colleges 
and Seminaries, all for the most part under denominational in- 
fluence, and all thus teaching religi< »us truth. Third, Volun- 
tary Churches with their educational adjuncts, the great source 
after all of popular and universal education, and upon which, to- 
day, the liberty and progress of America depend more directly 
than upon any other foundation. Through these we have as 
yet prospered ; very much because of that' feature of our Con- 
stitution, out-growth itself of evident Providence, by which we 



108 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

are divided into separate states or communities, and enabled 
thus more thoroughly to attend to these important fundamental 
forces. It is under their stimulus that American character is so 
independent, so self- asserting, so intelligent, so progressive, so 
universally, perhaps, audacious in every field of thought and 
action. The differences between American and English charac- 
ter are plainly traceable to the universal diffusion of education 
among us — to its comparatively superficial character — to the 
exclusively materialistic nature of the rewards to be gained by 
exertion. And alas, with all, there is clear experience of one 
great inherent defect : so great that unless it is met speedily, 
the end of all may come, that that Bible which created and 
shaped our freedom, and veneration and love for which, origin- 
ated our schools, is, practically, no longer open there ; is in fact, 
in many places, the only book legally and by name forbidden 
and excluded. Such a possibility, it is plain, never occurred to 
the fathers, whether of the seventeenth or the eighteenth cen- 
tury. Had they dreamed of it, they would have framed our 
Constitution so as always to avoid it. A horror of religious 
tyranny, an enthusiasm for religious freedom and for the formu- 
laries of religious toleration, led them to forget the dangers which 
might spring from the toleration of systematic irreligion and 
from the acts of those who, too highly valuing their own creed, 
first undermine public education by obtaining the exclusion of 
religion from Schools, and then prepare to attack the system as 
therefore positively and absolutely injurious. 

My Fellow Citizens : If I have seemed thus far desultory and 
not practical, I trust it has been only in appearance. I meet 
you on the threshold of a new century, a century called by the 
Avoiid the second century of the Republic, but really the third, 
substantially, of the formation of the American nation, a graft, 
yet a separate stock from England in this continent, then the 
region of vastness and mystery. The train of thought I have 
thus far followed I trust is natural and pertinent. The chief 
distinctions of the century ; to whom they specially belong ; 
that they have resulted from the natural action, under Provi- 
dence, of that peculiar sort of freedom which is British in contra- 
distinction to that of any other nationality ; the origin and 



ORATION CORTLANDT PARKER. 109 

individualities of that freedom, its intrinsic characteristics and 
worth : how it has been nurtured and maintained abroad — how 
here among ourselves ; these are the great topics at which I have 
glanced, suggesting them merely to your future reflection, and 
all along with a practical purpose, to wit, to sound the alarm for 
the future of the Public School, and of the country, whose in- 
stitutions confessedly depend upon it, and to appeal to all to up- 
hold and extend collegiate education under denominational in- 
fluences as a means beyond the reach of political majorities, 
whereby the open Bible may still be a positive institution, its 
precepts positively inculcated, and the freedom and progress 
which depend upon it thus perpetuated. For, if we will only 
observe and think, we must plainly see that, so far, no freedom 
has lasted, anywhere, where there was not the open Bible — that 
is to say, the Christian religion, with perfect toleration. 

It is just here that I am met with the ordinary and plausible 
objection that the American Constitution acknowledges no re- 
ligion, and does not even mention a God, and that its only 
reference to it is the amendment " that Congress shall make no 
law respecting an -establishment of religion or prohibiting the 
free exercise thereof," the argument being that nothing which 
teaches religion can be done under the provisions of law. To 
which there is easy reply : first, that the subject is one not 
intended to belong to Congress, nor to the national Legislature ; 
that it concerns internal police, a topic entirely reserved to the 
States ; that if this is not fully correct still the very amendment, 
construed by the established rule " Expressio unius est exchisio, 
altei'ius," legalizes all legislation by Congress on the subject of 
religion not implying its establishment nor the prohibition of 
its free exercise — and that it is to the Christian religion beyond 
all doubt that this amendment relates. And this view is 
strengthened by a later amendment which makes a difference 
in guilt between those in arins against it who have taken an 
oath (appealing thereby to Grod) to support the government, 
and those who have not. I add that Congress has, from the 
beginning, legislated and acted so as to acknowledge religion > 
as by requiring an oath of office and oaths from witnesses and 
by punishing perjury, by establishing by rule the opening of 



HO OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

their sessions with prayer, and by constituting chaplains, both 
for themselves and for troops, and manifold other acknowl- 
edgments of the Supreme Being and the Christian religion 
which He has ordained. 

And going back to documents still operative, except so far as 
expressly and by necessary implication repealed, w T e find the 
articles of confederation recite that "it has pleased tbe Great 
Governor of the world to incline the hearts of the Legislatures 
of the various States to ratify this perpetual union ; " we find 
the Declaration of Independence asserting the being of God, 
His Creation and the equality He established among men, 
appealing to Him as the Supreme Judge of the world for the 
rectitude of the intentions of its signers, and expressing that 
they rely on "Divine Providence for protection" in the struggle 
they initiated ; we find Congress after the Revolution passing 
the celebrated ordinance of 1787, for the government of the 
territory Northwest of the River Ohio, and declaring certain 
articles of compact between the original States and the people 
and States in the territory, forever unalterable save by common 
consent, in order to " extending the fundamental principles of 
civil and religious liberty which form the bases whereon these 
republics, their laws and constitutions are erected, and to fix 
and establish those principles as the basis of all law and consti- 
tutions, and governments which forever shall be formed in the 
said territory ; " and among these articles is the following : 
" Religion, morality and knowledge being necessary to good 
government and the happiness of mankind, Schools and the 
means of education shall forever be encouraged" If these 
citations, with the practice of the Continental Congress and 
that which succeeded it, the successive Presidents and the various 
Departments, Executive and Judicial, all in acknowledgment of 
the claims of the Christian religion, do not negative the alle- 
gation that the Nation, as such, has no religion, it is difficult to 
say how such a charge can as to any nation be disproved. 

The ordinance of 1787, when it mentioned religion and mo- 
rality and made schools and education having them for its 
purpose or effect an unalterable compact between the old 
Thirteen and all its Northwest future, referred to the Christian 



Oration — cortlandt parser. Ill 

religion ; that religion which was held by all the people then 
within the newly-established confederation. That ordinance 
remained in force, notwithstanding the subsequent Constitu- 
tion, and by it the government positively declared that it had a 
religion ; that that religion was Christian, and that it was for- 
ever to remain and be promoted by schools. 

But this argument for the Bible; in the schools does not stop 
with the consideration of the national Constitution. As already 
said, the subject does not ex natura belong to Congress nor to 
national matters ; it concerns internal police, a topic entirely 
reserved to the States, and when we consider the question in 
this light, all doubt dissipates. For those who will study the 
history of the various Colonies, will find in each that the main- 
tenance and propagation of the Christian religion was one of 
their chief motives. If this was conspicuously true in New 
England, it was also true elsewhere, and especially in this our 
State of New Jersey. The Dutch who peopled Bergen and 
Somerset, the Quakers who found their home at Salem and 
Burlington, as well as the English Puritans who settled at Eliza- 
beth, Newark and Woodbridge, and the Scotch who came 
later direct to Baritan Bay, all brought with them a deep 
sense of religion and sought its perpetuation. The laws of the 
early colonists stamped their form of Christianity on the com- 
monwealth, and they have never been repealed. Our latest 
constitution formally adopts the Common law of which it is 
part, and in an illustration of it there yet appears upon our 
statute book a law in the words following : " all impostors in 
religion such as personate our Saviour Jesus Christ, or suffer 
then followers to worship or pay divine honors, or terrify, de- 
lude or abuse the people by false denunciation of judgments, 
shall, on conviction, suffer fine and imprisonment." And 
another : " if any person shall wilfully blaspheme the holy 
name of God, by denying, cursing or contumaciously reproach- 
ing His being or providence, or by cursing or by contuma- 
ciously reproaching Jesus Christ or the Holy Ghost, or the 
Christian religion or ihe holy word of God (that is, the canon- 
ical Scriptures contained in the books of the Old and New Tes- 
tament) or by profane scoffing at or exposing them or any of 



112 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

them to contempt and ridicule, any person so offending shall, 
on conviction, be punished by fine," or in State's Prison. The 
first constitution of the State, whose date is July 2, 1176, a De- 
claration of Independence prior to that in Philadelphia, made by 
a convention convened a month before and in session a century 
ago this day, declares in Article xix. that " there shall be no es- 
tablishment of any one religious sect in this Colony, in prefer- 
ence to another, and that no Protestant inhabitant of this Col- 
ony shall be denied the enjoyment of any civil rights merely on 
account of his religious principles, but that all persons profess- 
ing a belief in the faith of any Protestant sect * * * * 
shall fully and freely enjoy every privilege and immunity en- 
joyed by others, their fellow subjects.'' 

The present Constitution, confirmed June 29, 1844, begins 
with the fitting preamble, " We, the people of the State of New 
Jersey, grateful to Almighty God for the civil and religious lib- 
erty which He hath so long permitted us to enjoy, and looking 
to Him for a blessing upon our endeavors to secure and trans- 
mit the same unimpaired to succeeding generations, do ordain 
and estabhsh this Constitution." Succeeding sections secure 
and perpetuate the fund for free schools for the equal benefit of 
all the people of the State. Can a reasonable man contend that 
in endeavoring to secure and transmit civil and religious liberty, 
a people greatf ul to A lmighty God for it, and looking to Him for 
a blessing, can begin by driving His word from the schools, the 
chosen means of securing this security ? 

It is objected that this fund is for the equal benefit of all, and 
that if the Bible be in the school, those who deny it, or oppose 
its inculcation, pay tax without a benefit. I answer, that the 
context describes the public school as for the equal benefit of all, 
and so it is if aU may, if they please, have advantage from it. 
Whatever the reason for which I do not choose to use it, it is 
my fault, if not my loss. I pay taxes for roads which I never 
use, for sewers with which I will not connect, for gas which I 
will not introduce. All taxes suppose equal benefit to all the as- 
sessed. No one can resist payment if by possibility, living with- 
in the district, he may have the benefit he refuses. 

It is insisted by some that no use of the Bible can be made 



ORATION — CORTLANDT PARKER. 113 

without in some degree teaching the opinions, held by the teach- 
er, and that therefore the rights of sects are involved. The an- 
swer is that the risk is nothing to the harm which must occur if 
anything like morals or religion is excluded from the schools. 
Beside, the argument would interdict all legal proceedings. Why 
should it be that the Bible should be acknowledged by oaths 
taken upon it, its Author daily appealed to as the final Judge of 
the World ; belief in a future state of rewards and punishments 
made the test of the capacity to speak truth ; and yet the Book 
and the name of the Almighty be excluded from the schools. 
What is this but to teach irreligion ? And what is that but to 
make education a curse, instead of a blessing ? Says wise and 
good Sir Thomas More in his Utopia : " If you allow your 
people to be badly taught, their morals to be corrupted from their 
childhood, and then when they are men punish them for the very 
crimes to which they have been trained in childhood — what is 
this, biit first to make them thieves, and then to punish them ?" 

Some say : divide the cost of public education among the sects, 
on condition of their maintaining the schools. Such a course 
would be resigning to others a duty which belongs to the State. 
Its result would be the abandonment of the fundamental princi- 
ple of the Republic, expressed by Burke in the oft-repeated say- 
ing that "education is the cheap defence of nations ;'' more di- 
rectly, that public safety requires the State to see to it that her 
citizens are fit to rule. In truth, the State ought to compel every 
child to attend some school. She cannot confide to others a du- 
ty so vital. 

I should be ashamed, feUow citizens, to apologize for the se- 
riousness of my subject. Its importance and propriety cannot 
be over estimated. No Fourth of July should be disgraced by 
bombast and self-adulation by exhilarants or anaesthetics. It 
is the National Sabbath, and like a sabbath, should be dedica- 
ted, not simply to rest and joy, but also to self-improvement. 
But this Centennial anniversary is a day of peculiar solemnity. 
Its arrival is a test of our national stability. We have invited 
the world to meet and rejoice with us. Only through God's 
mercy does it come to us. We have been snatched as the brands 
from the very fire. It might have been a day of silence, of 



114 Our national iftjBitEJ!. 

shame and despair. The occasion calls for gravity, self-exami- 
nation, truth, resolution of amendment, as well as for thankful- 
ness and hope. Honest self-scrutiny forbids unmixed confi- 
dence. Time, the nation has passed through many dangers. 
Foreign war has only strengthened it. Out of the terrific civil 
conflict from which we have just emerged, whose embers still 
smoke and every now and then almost blaze, it has come, poli- 
tically, stronger than ever. But while the edifice stands erect, 
when the people of the earth doubtful through the amazing 
struggle, are astonished and in view of the great things enacted 
before their eyes, the great mountain, whose top stone has been 
brought forth with shoutings, cry, " grace unto it," while we hail 
the day as a minister of fraternity — a day of hand-shaking that 
is no longer a bloody chasm — a day of the fatted calf without a 
jealous brother, there are suddenly revealed signs of evil, occa- 
sions of grave anxiety. What timber in our edifice is sound ? 
What stone beyond risk of crumbling? What spikes free from 
rust? What fastenings wholly secure? How dreadfully are 
we not illustrating the wisdom of Plato the Divine, when he said 
" as long as beggars hungering and thirsting for office, rush in- 
to the administration of public affairs, political life will be but 
a fierce contest for shadows, a strife for civil pre-eminence, as 
though this were in reahty the highest good : laws will be but 
the remedies of quack physicians, giving temporary relief, yet 
ultimately aggravating what they cannot cure, whilst the rotten- 
ness of the foundation will finally bring down the superstruc- 
ture, whatever may be the external form to which its security 
may be fondly confided." The passage I quote seems well nigh 
inspired. Corruption, moral rottenness is the great danger of 
this Republic. Not in politics alone; far less in the action of 
one party or the other. What we find there, is but illustrative 
of what is elsewhere, yea, everywhere, Materialism is so tri- 
umphant. It has so eaten into the heart of all good things — 
I had almost said, of all good men. The higher life is so un- 
popular, so derided, so dispised. What is generally desired that 
is not gilded ? How few dispise glitter and sound ? How in- 
sane is the appetite for success ? How dolefully do we all gaze 
around, searching for men — men such as we have read of — such 



ORATION CORTLANDT TARKRR. 115 

as some of us have known — fit to be called statesmen. I do not 
say we have none. Thank God! we have, but, comparatively, 
how few. Most are but aspirants for personal success— the suc- 
cess of sound, of glitter, of shoddy style. It is the fault of our 
educational habits that then- scoj>e is so contracted. We hurry 
into action. The sooner at work, every man thinks, the better. 
So men are in action unequipped. And even the best rush by 
the shortest road towards their meditated goal. How many 
wait and seek the formation of character, make that their motive, 
and then seek or accept life's tasks as duties. And so, general 
rottenness goes on, till even the horrid expositions on which the 
press batters to-day would be almost welcomed as necessaiy to 
the hope of better things, if it were not for the fear that famili- 
arity with scandal and tilth may breed contempt for evil accu- 
sation. 

It is in view of this underlying want of moral tone, cropping 
out in every quarter that I have chosen and press my subject 
to-day. I have endeavored to speak as they would speak who 
laid the foundations of our freedom and progress, the men of 
1GG4 who once walked these streets, who laid its broad avenues 
and parks, who established here religion and law, whose char- 
acteristics still live recognizable in many a descendant, whose 
lives and plans still contribute to the happiness we enjoy. I 
have endeavored to speak as they would speak who rejoiced one 
hundred years ago over the news of the Declaration we cele- 
brate — a Declaration to which they came slowly, unwillingly, 
only from conscientious belief in its necessity, in calm religious 
resolution. 

I have endeavored to speak as he would speak, chief promo- 
ter of the subsequent constitution, and so most of all, the Father 
of his Country. 

Hear this Proclamation, made immediately on the completion 
of the Constitution, as an illustration of his views on the ques- 
tion whether the nation has a religion, and how intimately that 
religion should be connected with education. 



31 fi OUR NATIONAL JTTBTLEE. 

BY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 

A PEOCLAMATION. 

Whereas, it is the duty of all Nations to acknowledge the Provi- 
dence of Almighty God, to obey His Will, to be grateful for 
His Benefits, and to humbly implore His Protection and Fa- 
vor ; and whereas, both Houses of Congress have, by their 
joint Committee, requested me " To recommend to the peo- 
" pie of the United States a day of public Thanksgiving and 
"Prayer, to be observed by acknowledging with giateful 
" Hearts the many and signal Favors of Almighty God, espe- 
" cially by affording them an opportunity peaceably to estab- 
" lish a Form of Government for their Safety and Happiness ;" 
Now, therefore, I do recommend and assign Thursday, the 
twenty-sixth day of November next, to be devoted by the people 
of these States to the Service of that great and glorious Being, 
who is the beneficent Author of all the good that was, that is, or 
that will be ; that we may then all unite in rendering unto Him 
our sincere and humble Thanks for His kind Care and Protec- 
tion of the People of this Country previous to their becoming 
a Nation ; for the signal and manifold Mercies, and the favor- 
able Interpositions of His Providence in the Cause and Conclu- 
sion of the late War ; for th? great Degree of Tranquility, 
Union and Plenty which we have since enjoyed ; for the peace- 
able and rationable Manner in which we have been enabled to 
establish Constitutions of Government for our Safety and Hap- 
piness, and particularly the National one now lately instituted; 
for the civil and religious Liberty with which we are blessed, 
and the Means we have of acquiring and diffusing useful Knowl- 
edge ; and, in general, for all the great and various Favors 
which He hath been pleased to confer upon us. 

And also, That we may then unite in most humbly offering 
our Prayers and Supplications to the great Lord and Ruler of 
Nations, and beseech Him to pardon our National and other 
Transgressions ; to enable us all, whether in public or private 
Stations, to perform our several and relative duties properly 
and punctually ; to render our National Government a blessing 
to all the People, by constantly being a Government of wise, 



ORATION — CORTLANDT PARKER. 117 

just and constitutional Laws, discreetly and faithfully executed 
and obeyed ; to protect and guide all Sovereigns aud Nations, 
(especially such as have shewn kindness unto us ;) and to bless 
them with good Government, Peace and Concord ; to promote 
the Knowledge and Practice of true Religion and Virtue, and 
the Euerease of Science among them and us ; and generally, to 
grant unto all Mankind such a Degree of temporal Prosperity 
as He alone knows to be best. 

Given under my Hand, at the City of New- York, the third 
day of October, in the year of our Lord one thousand, seven 
hundred and eighty-nine. 

G. WASHINGTON. 

I would speak the sentiments of these fathers on this solemn 
day. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance. It is ever in 
danger. Now from foreign enmity — now from intestine strife — 
at other times, as now, from the growth of corruption — irrever- 
ence for right as right, materialism, defiling everything, destroy- 
ing time manhood, disgusting the good and competent with public 
affairs, and leaving the State to be managed and directed by cun- 
ning incompetency, seeking and using place for profit, scoffing at 
duty, — in a word, from moral rottenness. And the escape and, 
blessed be God there will be escape — I speak with no fear, for 
God is with us — from ruin to come, the ruin that has befallen 
other republics, the ruin that has so far been avoided, because 
our freedom is that which comes of the open Bible, is restoration 
and increase of its dominance and influence. Stand by it, fel- 
low citizens, as the true Palladium of your liberties. Maintain 
the schools — and maintain it in the schools. Let it be an insti- 
tution there, recognized and revered. Thus much can we do as 
citizens, nor little as it seems can we over estimate its extent. But 
this must not be all. In every way must we seek to saturate the 
community with Christian morality. The Church, the Sunday 
School, Colleges and Academies where religion is directly 
taught, the support of these is not only our duty as Christians. 
It is our duty also as patriots. The very infidel, if he loves his 
country, will aid in the promulgation of tolerant Christianity 
and the morality it inculcates. For, let no man doubt that just 



118 



OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 



iu proportion to the extent that that morality prevails, just in 
proportion as we remain the land of the open Bible— in that 
proportion, and that only, may we be assured that our freedom 
and progress will last, and that another century will find the 
Nation one great, happy, republican and free. 



ADDKESS 

BY COL. ALBERT E. LAMAR. 

delivered at the centennial celebration, savannah, ga., 
july 4th, 1876. 

. Fellow Citizens : Impelled by causes not necessary to be 
mentioned here, for many years the people of this country have 
failed to gather in the spirit of patriotic devotion around a com- 
mon altar. But to-day, from one end of the land to the other, 
the people will renew their vows to the great principles which 
gave birth to the American republic in 1776. Standing in the 
shadow of a dead century and facing the dawn of a coming one, 
the people of Savannah have determined to light again the torch 
of liberty, and with confident hopes to transmit it to their chil- 
dren and their children's children. In order to give suitable 
mark to this Centennial day 'they have selected a gentleman to 
read to you the Declaration of Independence, a document whose 
vehement eloquence not only moved the arms and hearts of 
American patriots, but set Europe ablaze in revolution a hun- 
dred years ago. I have the honor to introduce to you Capt. 
Kobt. Falligant, a gentleman who in the last struggle for consti- 
tutional liberty nobly distinguished himself, and illustrated 
Georgia, his native State, 



CENTENNIAL GROWTH 

IN 

NATIONALITY, INDUSTRIES, AND EDUCATION- 

AN ADDRESS BY HON. HENRY BARNARD, L.L.D., 

DELIVERED AT HARTFORD, CONN., JULY 4tH, 1876. 

Fellow-Citizens, Countrymen, one and all, for on this day, al- 
though we meet here formally as one of the cities and towns of 
this Commonwealth at the call of our chief municipal officer, 
and on the proclamation of the Governor of the State, we are 
members of a still larger community, governed by one Consti- 
tution, having a common history, and sharing in the weal or the 
woe of a common destiny — we are an integral part of a great 
whole, a Nation whose marvelous expansion in territory by 
peaceful acquisition, whose vast increase of numbers by annual 
accessions of people flying to us as to a city of refuge from 
every country on the globe, whose rapid development of diversi- 
fied occupations, of comfortable homes, and publi-c institutions 
of learning, science, and religion, we have come together from 
the promptings of our own hearts, as have ten thousand other 
local communities all over the land, to commemorate, as the di- 
rect and legitimate fruits of that Declaration, which has just 
been so well read, and of the acts which followed. In that Decla- 
ration, and in those results, my countrymen, you and I, all of us, 
speakers and hearers, find to-day not only the themes of our 
meditations but our inspiration, and the springs of that exultant 
joy with which we hail the morn that ushers in the second 
century of our national existence. That Declaration was made 
by the Representatives of the Colonies as States-United, the 
war which it justified was carried on by their joint councils and 
arms, and the Confederation, or Compact of States which had be- 
gun to loosen even before the war was ended, and threatened to 
dissolve iu anarchy and disgrace as soon as the pressure of a 
common enemy was removed, was in 1787 consolidated into a 



ADDRESS — HENRY BARNARD. 121 

Constitutional Republic, national in all the essential attributes 
of sovereignty, leaving to each State all administration which 
touched the immediate interests of families and individuals. 

I. Let us, then, in the spirit of that Proclamation issued by 
President Washington on the 3d of October, 1789, in less than 
six months after his inauguration as President of the United 
States, in pursuance of a joint resolution of both Houses of Con- 
gress, and " of the bounden duty of all nations," — thank God, 
liumbly and sincerely, " for His kind care and protection of the 
people of this country previous to their becoming a nation ;" 
" for His providential interposition in the course and conclusion 
of the late war ;" and " for the peaceable and rational manner in 
which we have been enabled to establish constitutions of gov- 
ernment for our safety and happiness, and especially for the 
national one now lately instituted ; for the civil and religious 
liberty with which we are blessed, and the means we have of 
acquiring and diffusing useful knowledge ;" and beseech Him 
" to enable us to render our national government a blessing to 
all the people by constantly being a government of wise, just, 
and constitutional laws, faithfully executed and obeyed." 

Under the operations of this national government the territory 
of the republic has been augmented seven-fold, until it exceeds the 
area of all the States of Europe ; the population has increased 
from 3,000,000 to 40,000,000 ; the thirteen States have multi- 
plied to thirty-eight, each charged with only that local admin- 
istration relating to land, business, travel, traffic, schools, 
churches, charities, and police, which touches nearly every 
family and individual, while the larger interests of emigration, 
commerce, currency, international and interstate communica- 
tion, the general welfare and the protection of all from aggression 
or belligerent legislation, foreign or domestic, are left national. 

To this increase of territory and population, and to the co- 
ordinate administration of all these local and national interests, 
there appears no limit fixed in natural laws, or the capacities of 
the people, if properly trained to sobriety of judgment and life. 
Surely, no other government in the same age of the world has 
conferred so many benefits on its own people, or interfere! less 
with the happiness of others. 



122 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

II. The growth of the country in all its diversified industries 
is most conspicuously shown in the Centennial Exposition now 
open in Philadelphia. Although I have made two visits, I feel 
myself utterly unprepared to describe the wealth, splendor, and 
variety of industrial productions of our own and other coun- 
tries gathered within the grounds of that Exposition. For our 
present purpose it will suffice to say that we should be deeply 
thankful that the necessities of our early settlers, and of the 
great mass of all who come to this country now to abide with 
us, as well as the development of our national resources, make 
labor — labor of hand and head — the normal condition of all our 
people. Under this stern necessity, invention has been quick- 
ened and applied to all agricultural, commercial, and manufac- 
turing operations, in such various and useful ways, as can only 
be appreciated when brought together and actually seen. 

III. The earliest schools on this continent were instituted by 
the Dominicans and other religious orders of the Catholic Church 
in Mexico, Central America, and the French settlements in 
Canada, before 1600. The earliest Free School, so-called, in the 
English colonies, was established at Charles City, Virginia, 
through the efforts of Rev. Patrick Copeland, in 1621. These 
efforts had been preceded by the Virginia Company in a grant 
of 10,000 acres of land in Henrico county to a college at James- 
town, ' for the training up of the children of the infidels in true 
religion, moral virtue, civility, and other godliness,' for which 
purpose the King had granted in 1618 a special license for a 
general contribution over his realm of England, which was 
taken up in 1619, and amounted to £2,043. The Company in 
the same year (1619) instructed the Governor to see " that each 
town, borough, and hundred procured, by just means, a certain 
number of their children to be brought up in the first elements 
of literature ; and that the most towardly of them should be 
fitt c d for college, in the building which they proposed to pro- 
cure as soon as any profit arose from the estate appropriated to 
that use ; and earnestly required their utmost help and further- 
ance in that pious and important work." An individual, signing 
himself " Dust and Ashes," in 1621 donated £550 "to the 
erecting of some school, or some other way whereby some of 



ADDRESS HENRY BARNARD. 123 

the children of the Virginians might be brought up in the 
Christian religion and good manners." * * * 

In all the New England States, following the example of 
England in the old educational foundations, Free Schools were 
first established in all the older and larger towns, which were 
invariably not what are now known as free schools — schools of 
gratuitous instruction, elementary common schools, supported 
by tax, and without any charge for tuition or fees, but gram- 
mar schools, and free originally in the sense of being exempt 
from any ecclesiastical supervision, or sometimes as liberal in 
the character of their instruction, and never actually free or 
gratuitous even to children of certain localities, or specified 
kinship to the founders. They were always endowed — support- 
ed practically by the rents of land, granted by the colonial or 
municipal authorities, or the income of bequests from beneficent 
individuals, but always exacting some payment in wood or 
money for the support of the teacher and incidental expenses. 

It is difficult for the present generation of teachers, pupils, 
and school officers, with our numerous and costly school edifi- 
ces, and their equipment for warmth, ventilation, and physical 
comfort, with our well-graded system of classes, books and 
teachers, with our normal schools, institutes, and associations 
for the training and improvement of teachers, with our well- 
endowed academies, high schools, colleges, and professional 
seminaries of every kind, to understand the limited educational 
resources with which the first century of our national existence 
opened and which continued to within tue last forty years. 
* # * * * * * 

From these references [to the school and college text books, 
and autographic remisincences by pupils and teachers, of 
" schools as they were " in all of the old thirteen states before 
1800], it is evident that the school and the college were very 
different institutions then, and now, Their buudings, books, 
and teachers seem altogether insufficient to train the men and 
women who made the homes, farms, and workshops of the 
ante-Revolutionary period, achieved our independence, and 
framed the constitutions and laws under which our national 
and state governments were organized. And we must find in 



124 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

other agencies — in the daily straggle for existence, in the obe- 
dience, industry, and sobriety of the family, in the teaching of 
the Sabbath and the study of the Bible, in the responsibilities 
of local magistracy and the discussions incident to town and 
colonial administration — in such agencies as these, combined 
with very narrow but thorough formal instruction, we must find 
the mental vigor, political wisdom, and general intelligence 
which enabled our ancestors to do their great work. The 
school in its best conditions, except as it trains the faculties, 
and gives the key to books, is subordinate to actual business, be 
it of head or hand, thoughtfully done. * * * 

In this, as well as in other portions of the great field of public 
administration, Washington, and the fathers of the republic, dis- 
played their far-reaching sagacity and patriotism. In his Fare- 
well Address to the People of the United States, he struck the 
key-note of all exhortation on this subject : " Promote, as one 
object of primary importance, institutions for the general dif- 
fusion of knowledge. In proportion as the structure of a gov- 
ernment gives force to public opinion, it is essential that pub- 
lic opinion should be enlightened." In laying out the Federal 
City which now bears his name, under authority of Congress, 
among the squares reserved for public uses was one for a Na- 
tional University. In his first formal recommendations of spe- 
cial measures to the consideration of both Houses of Congress 
was " the promotion of science and literature. Knowledge in 
every country is the surest basis of public happiness." in a 
subsequent speech he distinctly recommends a National Univer- 
sity, as well as a Military Academy. " A primary object of such 
an institution, gathering its students from every portion of the 
country, should be instruction in the science of government." 

What changes in the civil and diplomatic service, and in the 
national feeling of the country, would have followed the estab- 
lishment of a National University at the Capitol, founded on 
Washington's suggestions, and under his administration, with 
its students " gathered from all parts of the country for the 
completion of their education in all branches of polite literature, 
in arts and sciences, in acquiring knowledge in the principles 
of politics and good government," escaping the local prejudices 
and. habitual jealousies of being brought up and always living 
within State lines, and in forming friendships in juvenile years 
with kindred spirits born under different social and geographi- 
cal relations! How much of misconception from non-acquain- 
tance, which gradually widens and deepens into open alienation, 



ADDRESS IIENRY BARNARD. 125 

and finally, when fostered and inflamed by artfnl and ambitions 
demagogues, into violent antagonism, would have been avoided! 
bow strong but subtle, numerous yet almost unseen, would 
have been the ties which, knit in their academic walks, and 
strengthened in the generous competition of scholarship, and 
in the interchanged visits of each other's homes, and by corres- 
pondence, would have been interwoven into the domestic life 
and the public action of those graduates in the course of a cen- 
tury! How much the sentiment of nationality, the grateful 
feeling of being the recipients of the culture provided by a com- 
mon country, would have been fostered ! and how the public 
service, supplied, as it would have been, at least by all the ear- 
lier Presidents and heads of departments, from these graduates, 
trained in languages and sciences such as the public interests 
required, for its curriculum must have been moulded by 
public opinion, would have been elevated and rescued from the 
low personal and partisan purposes to which it has been de- 
graded ! Looked at from an educational point of view, and in 
connection with the immense scientific material which have 
been gradually gathered in the necessary operations of the 
government, such a University, with its own and the libraries, 
museums, and galleries, to which its professors and graduates 
could have had access for original research, and the endowments 
which, like those of Washington and Smithson, it would have 
received, would have been worthy of the name of Washington, 
and ranked now second to no other in this or any country. 

Benjamin Franklin, with all his other claims to the affection- 
ate remembrances of his countrymen, should be honored for 
his great services to popular education in the foundation of one 
of the earliest public libraries in the country, and in his plan of 
an Academy and an English School, which is now the Universi- 
ty of Pennsylvania. Both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson 
were the avowed advocates of education in its elementary as 
well as its higher forms, and devoted their time and estates to 
the foundation of schools and higher seminaries of learning. 
Mr. Adams was the author of the section in the first Constitution 
of Massachusetts (1780) relating to the encouragement of liter- 
ature and schools, which has since been incorporated substan- 
tially into the organic law of every State. Twenty of the last 
years of Mr. Jefferson's life were spent in labors to estab- 
lish a great institution of liberal culture ; and he will be remem- 
bered, with the Declaration of Independence, as the founder of 
the University of Virginia,. 

I wish I could give with precision the name of that great 
benefactor of American education who inserted in the first draft 
of the Ordinance of 1784 for disposing of lands in the Western 



126 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Territory, the paragraph which reads as finally passed- 
" There shall be reserved the lot No. 16 of every township for 
the maintenance of public schools." This provision of 1785 was 
confirmed by the Ordinance of 1787, " for the government of 
the territory northward of the river Ohio," which also declared 
that " religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good 
government and the happiness of mankind, schools and other 
means of education shall be forever encouraged." Thus was 
incorporated into the land policy of the National Government 
an educational endowment, which, if it had been properly 
guarded and administered, would have increased with the ex- 
panding wants of each community, where these lands thus re- 
served were situated. Although sometimes neglected, and even 
misapplied, this magnificent endowment of over 70,000,000 
acres of public lands, has started germs of educational institu- 
tions in more than one hundred thousand districts, and kept 
alive by its place in the constitution and laws of each of the 
States where the lands were situated, the obligation of legisla- 
tors to consider the educational interests of the people. To this 
generous provision for elementary schools by Congress should 
be added the endowment of higher seminaries— a College or 
University in each of the States in which public lands were 
situated, to the extent of nearly 2,000,000 acres. * * 

Various attempts have been made from time to time to 
nationalize the educational feature of the Land Policy of the 
National Government, so as to embrace all the States ; but it 
was not until 1862, after the persistent efforts of Hon. Justin 
M. Morrill, of Vermont, that public lands were donated to the 
several States and Territories, to provide Colleges for the bene- 
fit of Agriculture and Mechanic ArtV by which over 9,000,000 
acres have already been set apart, and over forty institutions 
established or enlarged to realize the objects of the grant. 

In this direction reconstruction and reendowment could have 
been carried on promptly, liberally, and with universal accept- 
ance, if due regard had been had to the existing conditions of 
southern society. It is not too late now, although three gener- 
ations of children and youth have been swept beyond the 
reach of schools and colleges, since this work should have been 
begun, and made the problem of universal education moi'e dif- 
ficult. A noble example was set by Mr. George Peabody, and 
much good has been already done, and will continue to be done, 
by the mode in which his funds are applied, in stimulating local 
contributions, and helping sustain normal and model schools. 
But his benefaction, large as it is, is insignificant ; it should be 
at once a hundred, nay, a thousand-folded, to supply the edu- 
cational destitution of the States in which the old labor and 



ADDRESS HENRY BARNARD. 127 

social systems have been not only broken up, but left the 
ground perfectly covered and obstructed with their ruins 
But not only are funds wanted, but agents and teachers, with 
local sympathies and knowledge, must be searched for, and 
trained in the spirit and methods of Oberlin. A hundred nor- 
mal seminaries, like those of Hampton Institute, should as early 
as practicable be established and aided by Congress, and a sys- 
tem of industrial schools, for whites and blacks, be at once organ- 
ized all over the country. Here is a field in which the largest 
public spiiit can find scope for the fullest exercise. Let all 
unite to do even tardy justice to this long neglected interest, 
and let Southern men and women be employed in the work of 
educating their own children, under such systems, and even 
without regard to systems as developed in other parts of the 
country, as shall be found practicable in their hands. "What 
we want, what these States and the whole country want, are 
schools, numerous and good enough to meet the pressing want 
of over one million of children and youth. Let us have as soon 
as possible a generation of adults educated in the ideas and 
ways of the new dispensation. * * * 

The old Bell, which has become historic from its association 
with the Hail in which the title deed of our liberties was signed, 
and that more august instrument, the Constitution of the United 
States, was framed, has long since done its work. It rang out 
the old, and rang in the new dispensation. But its proclama- 
tion of "Liberty throughout the land" which had come echoing 
down the centuries from the old Hebrew Commonwealth, took 
a prophetic significance in 1864 ; and now, on this centennial 
anniversary, ten thousand bells have quickened its still linger- 
ing vibrations and carried their inspiring tones into the 
hearts of millions which they never reached before ; and on 
each recurring anniversary let them all — 

Ring out tho old, ring in the new — 
Ring out the false, ring in the true. 

Ring out a slowly dying cause, 

And ancient forms of party strife ; 

Ring in the nobler modes of life, 
With sweeter manners, purer laws. 

Ring out false pride in place and blood 

The civic slander and the spite: 

Ring in the law of truth and right, 
Ring in the common love of good. 

Ring out the darkness of the land. — 

Ring out the narrowing lust of gold ; 

Ring out the thousand wars of old, 
Ring in the thousand years of peace. 



THE GRAND MISSION OF AMERICA. 

AN ADDRESS BY REV. JOSEPH IT. TWITCIIELL, 

DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL, CELEBRATION AT HARTFORD, CONN., 
JULY 4th, 1876. 

This republic was ordained of God who has provided the 
conditions of the organization of the race into nations by the 
configuration of land and the interspaces of the sea. By these 
national organizations the culture and development of the race 
are secured. We believe that our nation is a creature of God — 
that he ordained it for an object, and we believe that we have 
eome comprehension of what that object is. He gave us the 
best results of the travail of ages past for an outfit, separating 
us from the circumstances that in the existing nations encum- 
bered these results, and sent us forth to do his will. We built 
on foundations already prepared a new building. Other men 
had labored and we entered upon their labors. God endowed 
and set us for a sign to testify the worth of men and the hope 
there is for man. And we are rejoicing to-day that in our first 
hundred years we seem to have measurably — measurably — ful- 
filled our Divine calling. It is not our national prosperity, 
great as it is, that is the appropriate theme of our most joyful 
congratulations, but it is our success in demonstrating that men 
are equal as God's children, which affords a prophecy of better 
things for the race. That is what our history as a lesson 
amounts to. 

There have been failures in particulars, but not on the whole ; 
though we fall short, yet still, on the whole, the outline of the 
lesson may be read clearly. The day of remembrance and of 
recollection is also the day of anticipation. We turn from look- 
ing back one hundred years to looking forward one hundred. 
It is well for some reasons to dwell upon to-day, but the proper 
compliment of our memories, reaching over generations, is hope 
reaching forward over a similar period of time. Dwelling on 



Ai)I)KESS REV. JOSEPH H. TWITCHELL. 129 

to-day — filling our eyes with it — we can neither see far back 
nor far on. We are caught in the contemplation of evils that 
exist and that occupy us with a sense of what has not been done 
and of uupleasing aspects. True there are evils, but think what 
has been wrought in advancing the work of the grand mission 
of America. Do we doubt that the work is to go on ? N6 ! 
There are to be strifes and contending forces. But as out of 
strife has come progress, so will it be hereafter. Some things 
that we have not wanted, as well as some things that we have 
wanted have been done, yet on the whole the result is progress. 
It is God's way to bring better things by strife. (The speaker 
here alluded to the battle of Gettysburg, where he officiated as 
chaplain in the burial of the dead — the blue and the gray often 
in the same grave — and said that the only prayer that he could 
offer was "Thy will be done, thy Kingdom come on earth as it 
is in heaven." 

The republic is to continue on in the same general career it 
has hitherto followed. The same great truths its history has 
developed and realized in social and civil life are to still further 
emerge. The proposition that all men are created equal is to 
be still further demonstrated. Human rights are to be vin- 
dicated and set free from all that would deny them — Is any law 
that asserts the dignity of human nature to be abrogated ? 
Never. The Republic is to become a still brighter and brighter 
sign to the nations to show them the way to liberty. We have 
opened our doors to the oppressed. Are those doors to be 
closed ? No ; a thousand times no. We have given out an in- 
vitation to those who are held in the chains of wrong. Is that 
invitation to be recalled ? No, nevei\ The invitation has been 
accepted; and here the speaker alluded to the fact — which 
shows how homogenous we finally become as a nation, though 
heterogenous through immigration — that the Declaration of 
Independence is read here to-day by a man whose father was 
born in Ireland ; the national songs are sung by a man who was 
himself born in Ireland ; and the company of singers here, 
nearly all, were born in Germany. Then he passed to the sub- 
ject of Chinese education in this country and spoke of Yung 
Wing and his life-work, alluding to him as the representa- 
tive of the better thought and hope of China, and then paid 



130 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

his respects to that part of the Cincinnati platform which 
alludes to this race. So long as he had voted he had given his 
support to this political p^rty whose convention was held at 
Cincinnati, but that platform wherein it seems on this point to 
verge toward un-American doctrine, he repudiated ; " I dis- 
own it ; I say woe to its policy ; I bescow my malediction 
upon it." Now, if there is any one here who will pay like 
respect to the platform of the other party the whole duty 
will be done. We are urged to-day in view of our calling, and 
of the fulfillment of the past to set our faces and hearts toward - 
the future in harmony and sympathy with the hope we are to 
realize. Let every man make it a personal duty and look within 
himself. God save the Eepublic ! May it stand in righteous- 
ness and mercy ; so only can it stand. If we forsake our calling, 
God will take away the crown He has given us. The kingdom 
of God will be taken from us and given to another nation which 
shall bring forth the fruits thereof. 



NEW HAVEN ONE HUNDRED YEAKS AGO. 

AN ORATION BY REV. LEONARD BACON, D, D. 

delivered at the centennial oelebltation, new haven, conn., 
july 4th, 1876. 

In the year of our Lord, one thousand seven hundred and 
seventy-six, the fourth of July fell ou Thursday. On that 
day, the Continental congress at Philadelphia gave notice to all 
nations that the political communities which it represented had 
ceased to be colonies, were absolved from their allegiance to the 
British Crown, and had become Independent States. The news 
that such a Declaration had been made was not Hashed along: 
electric wires ; it was not conveyed by steam car or steam boat ; 
nor can I learn that it was sent in all directions by an extraor- 
dinary express. But we may assume that as early as Tuesday 
morning, July 9th, the people of New Haven heard the news, 
and that such news reported by neighbor to neighbor, w T as 
talked about everywhere, with every variet}^ of opinion as to 
whether the Independence that had been declared could be 
maintained ; some rejoicing in the Declaration and sure that it 
would stand ; others doubting ; here and there one indignant, 
but not daring to express his indignation. All knew that the 
decisive step had been taken, and that the country was com- 
mitted to a life and death struggle, not for the recovery of 
chartered and inherited rights as provinces included in the 
British empire, but for an independent nationality and a place 
among acknowledged sovereignties. 

It is difficiih for us to form in our minds any just conception 
of what New Haven was a hundred years ago. But let us make 
the attempt. At that time, the town ( f New Haven included 
East Haven, North Haven, Hainden, West Haven, and almost 
the entire territory of what are now the three towns of Wood- 
bridge, Beacon Falls and Bethany. What is now the cily of 
New Haven was then "the town plat" — the nine original squares 



132 OUR NATIONAL JUBlLElL 

— with the surrounding fields and scattered dwellings, from the 
West river to the Quinnipiack, and between the harbor and the 
two sentinel cliffs which guard the beauty of the plain. Here 
was New Haven proper — the territorial parish of the First 
Ecclesiastical Society, all the outlying portions of the township 
having been set off into distinct parishes for church and school 
purposes. In other words, the town of New Haven, at that 
time was bounded on the east by Branford, on the north by 
Wallingford (which included Cheshire), on the west by Derby 
and Milford ; and all the " freemen" within those bounds were 
accustomed to assemble here in town meeting. 

A hundred years ago, there was a very pleasant village here 
at the " town-plat," though very little had been done to make it 
beautiful. This public square had been reserved, with a wise 
forethought for certain public uses ; but in the hundred and 
thirty-eight years that had passed since it was laid out by the 
proprietors who purchased these lands from the Indians, it had 
never been enclosed, nor planted with trees, nor graded ; for the 
people had always been too poor to do much for mere beauty. 
Here, at the centre of their public square, the planters of New 
Haven built a plain, rude bouse for public worship, and be- 
hind it they made their graves — thus giving to the spot a 
consecration that ought never to be forgotten. At the time 
which we are now endeavoring to recall, that central spot 
(almost identical with the site of what is now called Cen- 
tre church) had been reoccupied about eighteen years, by the 
1 irick meeting-house of the First church; and the burying-ground, 
enclosed with a rude fence, but otherwise neglected, was still the 
only burial-place within the parochial limits of the First Ecclesi- 
i i ati< sal Society. A little south of the burying-ground, was anoth- 
er brick edifice, the state house, so called even while Connecticut 
was still a colony. "Where the North church now stands, there 
was a framed meeting-house, recently built by what was called 
the Fair Haven Society, a secession from the White Haven, whose 
house of worship (colloquially called "the old Blue Meeting- 
house") was on the corner now known as St. John Place. Be- 
side those three churches there was another from which Church 
street derives its name. That was pre-eminently "the church" — 



ORATION — KEV. LEONAKD BACON. 133 

tnose who worshipped there would have resented the suggestion 
of its being a meeting-house. It was, in fact, a missionary sta- 
tion or outpost of the Church of England, and us such was served 
by a missionary of the English " Society for the Propagation of 
the Gospel in Foreign Parts." The building, though of respect- 
able dimensions (58x88), was smaller than the others, yet it had 
one distinction, — its steeple — a few feet south of Cutler corner, 
and in full view from the Green, though somewhat less'aspirrng 
than the other three — was surmounted by the figure of a crown 
signifying that, whatever might be the doctrine or the sentiment 
elsewhere, there the king's ecclesiastical supremacy was acknow- 
ledged, and loyalty to his sacred person was a conspicious virtue* 
Only a few householders worshipped there, for the Church of 
England was an exetic in the climate of New England. Not till 
the Episcopal church had become (in consequence of the event 
which this day commemorates) an organization dependent on no 
king but Christ, an American church, and therefore no longer 
English, did it begin to strike its roots deep into the soil and to 
nourish as if it were indigenous. Two other public buildings 
adorned this " market-place ;" one a httle scho< >l-liouse just be- 
hind the Fair Haven meeting-house and not unlike the old-time 
wayside school-houses in the country ; the other a county jail, 
which was a wooden structure fronting on College street about 
hah way from Elm to Chapel. 

Beside ah these pubhc buildings, representative of religions 
of government and justice, and of provision by the common- 
wealth against popular ignorance, there was the college, then as 
now, the pride of New Haven, but very different then from what 
we now see. The college buildings at that time were only three. 
First there was the original college edifice, to which, at its com- 
pletion, in 4718, the name of Yale had been given in honor of a 
distinguished benefactor, and from which that name had been 
gradually, and at last authoritatively, transferee! to the institution 
which has made it famous. That original Yale College was close 
on the corner of College and Chapel streets, a wooden building, 
long and narrow, tluee stories high, with three entries, and cu- 
pola and clock. 

Next in age was the brick chapel with its tower and spire, the 



134 OUK NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

building now called the Athenseuni and lately transformed into 
recitation rooms. More glorious yet was the new brick college 
(then not ten years old), which had been named Connecticut 
Hall, and which remains (though not unchanged) the "Old 
South Middle." 

Such was New Haven, a hundred years ago, in its public 
buildings and institutions. Its population, within the present 
town limits was, at the largest estimate, not more than 1800 
(including about 150 students) where there are now more than 
thirty times that number. If you ask, what were the people 
who lived here then, I may say that I remember some of them. 
Certainly they were, at least in outward manifestation, a 
religious people. Differences of religious judgment and sym- 
pathy had divided them, within less than- forty years, into 
three worshipping assemblies beside the little company that 
had gone over to the Church of England. Their religious zeal 
supported three ministers ; and I will venture to say that the 
houses were comparatively few in which there was not some 
form of household religion. Compared with other communities 
in that age (on either side of the ocean) they were an intelligent 
people. With few exceptions, they could read and write ; and 
though they had no daily newspapers, nor any knowledge of the 
modern sciences, nor any illumination frcm popular lectures, 
nor that sort of intelligence and refinement which comes from 
the theater, they knew some things as well as we do. They 
knew something about the chief end of man and man's respon- 
sibility to God ; something about their rights as freeborn sub- 
jects of their king ; something about their chartered freedom ; 
and the tradition had never died out among them. There were 
graves in the old burial ground which would not let them forget 
that a king may prove himself a traitor to his peopfe, and may 
be brought to account by the people whom he has betrayed. 
There were social distinctions then, as now. Some families 
were recognized as more intelligent and cultivated than others. 
Some were respected for their ancestry, if they had not disgraced 
it. Men in official* stations — civil, military, or ecclesiastical — 
were treated with a sort of formal deference now almost obso- 
lete ; but then, as now, a man, whatever title he might bear, 



ORATION — REV. LEONARD BACON. 135 

was pretty sure to be estimated by his neighbors at his real 
worth, and nothing more. Some men were considered wealthy, 
others were depressed by poverty, but the distinction between 
rich unci poor was not just what it is to-day. There were ho 
great capitalists, nor was there anything like a class of mere 
laborers with no dependence but their daily wages. The 
aggregate wealth of the community was very moderate, with no 
overgrown fortunes and hardly anything like abject want. 
Almost every family was in that condition — " neither poverty 
nor riches " — which a wise man of old desired and prayed for 
as most helpful to right living. Such a community was not 
likely to break out into any turbulent or noisy demonstrations. 
Doubtless the Declaration of Independence was appreciated 
as a great fact by the people of New Haven when they heard of 
it. Perhaps the church bells w r ere rung (that would cost noth- 
ing) ; perhaps there was some shouting by men and boys 
(that would also cost nothing) : perhaps there was a bonfire on 
the Green or at the " Head of the Wharf " (that would not cost 
much) ; but we may be sure that the great fact was not greeted 
with the thunder of artillery nor celebrated with fireworks ; for 
gunpowder was just then too precious to be consumed in that 
way. The little newspaper, then published in this town every 
Wednesday, gives no indication of any popular excitement on 
that occasion. On " Wednesday, July 10th, 1776," the Connecti- 
cut Journal had news, much of it very important, and almost 
every word of it relating to the conflict between the colonies and 
the mother country ; news from London to the date of April 9 ; 
from Halifax to June 4 ; from Boston to July 4 ; from New York 
to July 8, and from Philadelphia to July 6. Under the Phila- 
delphia date the first item was " Yesterday the Congress unani- 
mously resolved to declare the United Colonies Free and Indepen- 
dent States." That was all, save that, in another column, the 
printer said, " To-morrow will be ready for salo 'The Resolves of 
the Congress declaring the United Colonies Free and Independent 
States.' '' What the printer, in that advertisement, called " The 
Resolves of Congress," was , a handbill, 8 inches by 9, in two 
columns, with a rudely ornamented border, and was reproduced 
iu the Journal for July IT. It was the immortal state paper 



136 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

with which we are so familiar, and we may be sure that every- 
body in New Haven, old enough to know the meaning of it had 
read it, or heard it read, before another seven days had been 
counted. • 

The Declaration of Independence was not at all an unexpected 
event. It surprised nobody. Slowly but irresistibly the convic- 
tion had come that the only alternative before the United Colonies 
was absolute subjection to a British Parliament or absolute inde- 
pendence of the British crown. Such was the general convic- 
tion, but whether independence was possible, whether the time 
had come to strike for it, whether something might not yet be 
gained by remonstrance and negotiation, were questions on 
which there were different opinions even among men whose pa- 
triotism could not be reasonably doubted. 

[Here followed some of the facts intended to give a better 
understanding of " what were the thoughts, and what the hopes 
and fears of good men in New Haven a hundred years ago."] 

Having at last undertaken to wage war in defense of Ameri- 
can liberty, the Continental Congress proceeded, very naturally, 
to a formal declaration of war, setting forth the causes which 
impelled them to take up arms. 

That declaration preceded by a year the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence ; for at that time only a few sagacious minds had 
seen clearly the impossibility of reconciliation. Declaring to 
the world that they had taken up arms in self-defense and 
would never lay them down till hostilities should cease on the 
part of the aggressors, they nevertheless disavowed again the 
idea of separation from the British empire. " Necessity," said 
they, " has not yet driven us to that desperate measure ;" " we 
have not raised armies with ambitious designs of separating 
from Great Britain and establishing independent states." That 
was an honest declaration. Doubtless a few prophetic souls 
had seen the vision of a separate and independent nationality, 
and knew to what issue the long controversy had been tending ; 
but the thought and sentiment of the people throughout the 
colonies, at that time — the thought and sentiment of thoughtful 
and patriotic men in every colony — was fairly expressed in 
that declaration. They were English colonies, proud of the 



ORATION REV. LEONARD BACON. 137 

English blood and name ; and as young birds cling to the nest 
when the mother trusts them out half-fledged, so they clung to 
their connection with Great Britain not withstpn ding the un- 
motherly harshness of the mother country. TV;y were English 
as their fathers were ; and it was their English blood that 
roused them to resist the invasion of their English liberty. The 
meteor flag of England 

" Had braved a thousand years 
The battle and the breeze," 

and it was theirs ; its memories of Blenheim and Ramillies, of 
Crecy and Agincourt, were theirs ; and they themselves had 
helped to plant that famous banner on the ramparts of Louis- 
burg and Quebec. Because they were English they couid 
boast 

" That Chatham's language was their mother-tongue, 
And Wolfe's great name compatriot with their own." 

Because they were English, Milton was theirs, and Shakespeare, 
and the English Bible. They still desired to be included in the 
great empire whose navy commanded the ocean, and whose 
commerce encircled the globe. They desired to be under its 
protection, to share in its growth and glory, and enjoying their 
chartered freedom under the imperial crown, to maintain the 
closest relations of amity and mutual helpfulness with the mo- 
ther country and with every portion of the empire. 

All this was true in July, 1 775. When Washington consented 
to command the Continental armies " raised or to be raised," 
he thought that armed resistance might achieve some adequate 
security for the liberty of the colonies without achieving their 
independence. When, in his journey from Philadelphia to 
New York, hearing the news from Bunker Hill and how the 
New England volunteers had faced the British regulars in bat- 
tle, he said, " Thank God ! our cause is safe ;" he was not think- 
ing of independence, but only of chartered liberty. When, 
on his journey from New York to New Haven, he said to 
Dr. Ripley, of Green's Farms, who dined with him at Fair- 
field, " If we can maintain the war for a year we shall suc- 
ceed," his hopes was that by one year of unsuccessful war the 
British ministry and parliament would be brought to some 
reasonable terms of reconciliation. When (in the words of our 



138 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

historian Palfrey), " the roll of the New England drums at Cam- 
bridge announced the presence there of the Virginian, George 
Washington," he knew not, nor did Putnam know, nor Prescott, 
nor Stark, nor the farmers who had hastened to the siege of 
Boston, that the war in which he then assumed the chief com- 
mand was, what we now call it, the war of independence. With 
all sincerity the Congress, four days later, while solemnly de- 
claring " before God and the world," " The arms we have been 
compelled by our enemies to assume, we will, in defiance of 
every hazard, with unbating firmness and perseverance, employ 
for the preservation of our liberties, being with one mind re- 
solved to die freeman rather than to live slaves " — could also say, 
at the same time, to their "friends and fellow subjects in every 
part of the empire," " We assure them that we mean not to dis- 
solve that union which has so long and so happily subsisted be- 
tween us, and which we sincerely wish to be restored." The 
declaration on the 6th of July, 1175, was a declaration of war, 
but not of independence. 

Yet, from the beginning of the war, there was in reality only 
one issue — though a whole year must pass before that issue 
could be clearly apprehended by the nation and procl limed to 
the world. From the first clash of arms the only possible result 
was either subjection or separation ; either the loss of liberty or 
the achievement of independence. The first shot from Major 
Pitcairn's pistol on the village green at Lexington, at the gray 
dawn of April 19th, 1775, was fatal to the connection between 
these colonies and their mother country. That was " the shot 
that echoed round the world," and is echoing still along " the 
corridors of time." That first shot, with the slaughter that fol- 
lowed and the resistance and repulse of the British soldiery that 
day at Concord, was felt by thousands who knew in a moment 
that it meant war in defense of chartered liberty, but did not 
yet know that, for colonies at war with their mother country, 
independence was the only possible liberty. As the war pro- 
ceeded, its meaning, and the question really at issue became 
evident. The organization of a Continental army, the expulsion 
of the king's regiments and the king's governor from Boston, 
the military operations in various parts of the country, the 



ORATION REV. LEONARD BACON. 139 

collapse of the regal governments followed by the setting up of 
popular governments under the advice of the Continental Con- 
gress — what did such things mean but that the colonies must 
be thenceforward an independent nation or provinces conquered 
and enslaved ? 

It came, therefore, as a matter of course, that from the be- 
ginning of 18T6, the people in all the colonies began to be dis- 
tinctly aware that the war in progress was and could be nothing 
less than a war for independence. The fiction fundamental to 
the British Constitution, that the king can do no wrong, and 
that whatever wrong is done in his name is only the wrong- 
doing of his ministers, gave way before the harsh fact that they 
were at war, not with Parliament nor with Lord North, but 
with king George III. So palpable was the absurdity of profes- 
sing allegiance to a king who was waging war against them, that 
as early as April in that year, the Chief Justice of South Caro- 
lina under the new government just organized there, declared 
from his official seat in a charge to the grand jury, " The 
Almighty created America to be independent of Great Britain, 
let us beware of the impiety of being backward to act as in- 
struments in the Almighty hand now extended to accomplish 
His purpo'se." 

"When the public opinion of the colonies, north and south, 
was thus declaring itself, the time had come for action on the 
part of the Continental Congress. Accordingly on the 7th of 
June, Bichard Henry Lee, in behalf of the delegation from 
Virginia, proposed a resolution " that the united colonies are 
and ought to be free and independent states ; that they are 
absolved from all allegiance to the British crown ; and that all 
political connection between them and the state of Great 
Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved." It was agreed 
that the resolution should be considered the next day, and 
every member was enjoined to be present for that purpose. 
The next day's debate was earnest, for the Congress was by no 
means unanimous. Nobody denied or doubted that liberty 
and independence must stand or fall together, but some who 
had been leaders up to that point could not see that the time 
had come for such a declaration. Some were embarrassed by 



140 OUB NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

instructions given the year before and not yet rescinded. Tho 
debate having been continued through the day (which was 
Saturday) was adjourned to Monday, June 10. On that day 
the resolution was adopted in committee of the who'e by a vote 
of seven colonies against five, and so was reported to the house. 
Hoping that unanimity might be gained by a little delay, the 
house postponed its final action for three weeks, but appointed 
a committee to prepare a formal declaration of independence. 
Meanwhile, though the sessions of the congress were always 
with closed doors, these proceedings were no secret, and public 
opinion was finding distinct and authentic expression. I need 
not tell what was done elsewhere ; but I may say what was 
done, just at that juncture, in our old commonwealth. 

On the 14th of June there came together at Hartford, in obe- 
dience to a call from Jonathan Trumbull, governor, "a Genera] 
Assembly of the Governor and Company of the English colony 
of Connecticut, in New England, in America " — the last that was 
to meet under that nauie. It put upon its record a clear though 
brief recital of the causes which had made an entire separation 
from Great Britain i-he oruy possible alternative of slavery, and 
then — what? Let me give the words of the record : fc Ap- 
pealing to that God who knows the secrets of all hearts lor the 
sincerity of former declarations of our desire to preserve our 
ancient and constitutional relation to that nation, and protesting 
solemnly against their oppression and injustice which have driven 
us from them, and compelled us to use such means as God in His 
providence hath put in our power for our necessary defence and 
preservation, 

Resolved, unanimously, by this Assembly, that the delegates of 
this colony in General Congress be and they are hereby instruct- 
ed to propose to that respectable body, to declare the United 
American colonies free and independent States, absolved from 
all allegiance to the King of Great Britain, and to give the as- 
sent of this colony to such declaration." 

It was amid such manifestations of the national will coming 
in from various quarters, that the Congress, on Monday, July 1, 
took up the postponed resolution declaring the colonies indepen- 
dent, discussed it again in committee of the whole and passed 



oration — rev. Leonard racon. 141 

it, so bringing it back for a final decision. The vote in the house 
was postponed till the next day, and then, July 2, the resolution 
was adopted and entered on tut journal. In anticipation of this 
result, the formal Declaration of Independence had been report- 
ed by the special committee on the preceding Friday (June 28), 
and it was next taken up for consideration. After prolonged 
discussion in committee of the whole and various amendments 
(some of which were certainly changes for the better), it came 
before the house for final decision, and was then adopted, in 
the form in which we have heard it read to-day, the most illus- 
trious state paper in the history of nations. 

We may be sure, therefore, that whatever diversity of opinion 
there may have been in New Haven on the 4th of July, 1776, 
about the expediency of declaring independence at that time, 
news that such a declaration had been made by the Congress 
caused no great astonishment or excitement here. The General 
Assembly of Connecticut, had already made its declaration, and 
instructed its delegates in the Congress. One of those delegates 
was Roger Sherman (or as his neighbors called him, "Squire 
Sherman'') ; and nobody in this town, certainly, could be sur- 
prised to hear that the Continental Congress had done what 
Roger Sherman thought right and expedient to be done. The 
fact that Roger Sherman had been appointed on a committee to 
prepare the Declaration may have been unknown here, even in 
his own house ; but what he thought about the expediency of 
the measure was no secret. We, to-day, I will venture to affirm 
are more excited about the Declaration of Independence than 
they were to whom the news of it came, a hundred years ago. 

[Here followed a large number of records, or extracts from 
records, principally from the town clerk's office in New Haven, 
to show that our fathers on all proper public occasions were 
firmly, perhaps unconsciously, pursuing those steps which when 
taken by a brave and high-spirited people inevitably lead to 
their complete independence.] 

I have exhausted your patience, and must refrain from tracing 
even an outline of the war, as New Haven was concerned in it, 
after that memorable day a hundred years ago. Especially 
must I refrain from a description of the day when this town 



142 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

was invaded and plundered, and was saved from conflagration 
only by the gallant resistance of its citizens keeping the enemy 
at bay till it was too late for him to do all he designed. The 
commemoration of that day will be more appropriate to its 
hundredth anniversary, July 4th, 1879. From the day of that 
invasion to this time, no footstep of an enemy in arms has 
pressed our soil — no roll of hostile drums or blare of hostile 
trumpet has wounded the air of beautiful New Haven. So may 
it be through all the centuries to come ! 

But before I sit down, I may yet say one word, suggested by 
what I have just been reading to you from the records of 1775. 
At the time of that conflict with Great Britain — first for muni- 
cipal freedom, and then for national independence as the only 
security of freedom, the people of these colonies, and eminently 
the people of New England, were, perhaps, in proportion to 
their numbers, the most warlike people in Christendom. From 
the day when Miles Stan dish, in the Pilgrim settlement at Ply- 
mouth, was chosen " Captain" and invested with " authority of 
command" in military affairs, every settlement had its military 
organization. The civil order, the ecclesiastical, and the mili- 
tary, were equally indispensable. In every town, the captain 
and the trained militia were as necessary as the pastor and the 
church, or the magistrate and the town meeting. When the 
founders of our fair city came to Quinnipiack, 238 years ago, 
they came not only with the leaders of their unformed civil 
state, Eaton and Good y ear — not only with their learned minis- 
ter of God's word, Davenport, to be the pastor of the church 
they were to organize — but also with their captain, Turner, who 
had been trained like Standish in the wars of the Dutch Re- 
public, and who in the Pequot war of the preceding year had 
seen the inviting beauty of the Quinnipiack bay and plain. 
"Who does not know how, in those early times, 

" Our grandsires bore their guns to meeting, 

Each man equip'd, on Sunday morn, 

With psalm-book, shot, and powder-horn," 

and that, in the arrangements of the house of worship, a place 
for " the soldiers," near the door, was as much a matter of 
course as the place for " the elders " at the other side of the 
building ? "Who does not know that every able-bodied man 



ORATION REV. LEONARD BACON. 143 

(with few exceptions) was required to bear arms and to be 
trained in the use of them ? What need that I should tell how 
a vigorous military organization and the constant exhibition of 
readiness for self-defense, not less than justice and kindness in 
dealing with the Indians, were continually the indispensable 
condition of safety ? What need of my telling the story of King 
Philip's war, just two hundred years ago? Let it suffice to re- 
mind you of the long series of inter-colonial wars contempora- 
neous with every war between England and her hereditary en- 
emies, France and Spain — beginning in 1G89 and continued 
with now and then a few years' interruption till the final con- 
quest and surrender of the French dominion on this continent 
in 1762. It was in the last war of that long series that the 
military heroes of our war for independence had their training, 
and it was in the same war that the New England farmers and 
Virginia hunters, fighting under the same flag and under the 
same generals with British red-coats, learned how to face them 
without fear. That war which swept from our continent the 
Bourbon lillies and the Bourbon legions made us independent 
and enabled us, a few years later, to stand up as independent, 
and, in the ringing proclamation of July 4th, 1 770, to inform 
the world that where the English colonies had been struggling 
for existence, a nation had been born. 

Fellow citizens ! We have a goodly heritage — how came it to 
be ours ? God has given it to us. How ? By the hardships, 
the struggles, the self-denial, the manifold suffering of our fa- 
thers and predecessors on this soil ; by their labor and their 
valor, their conflicts with rude nature and with savage men ; 
by their blood shed freely in so many battles ; by their manly 
sagacity and the Divine instinct guiding them to build better 
than they knew. For us (in the Eternal Providence) were their 
hardships, their struggles, their sufferings, their heroic self- 
denials. For us were the cares that wearied them and their 
conflicts in behalf of liberty. For us were the hopes that 
cheered in labor and strengthened them in battle. For us — no 
not for us alone, but for our children too, and for the unborn 
generations. They who were here a hundred years ago, saw not 
what we see to-day (oh I that they could have seen it), but they 



144 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

labored to win it for us, and for those who shall come after us. 
In this sense they entered into God's plan and became the min* 
isters of his beneficence to us. We bless their memory to-day 
and give glory to their God. He brought a vine out of Egypt 
when he brought hither the heroic fathers of New England. 
He planted it and has guarded it age after age. We are now 
dwelling for a little while under its shadow and partaking of 
its fruit. Others will soon be in our places, and the inheritance 
will be theirs. As the fathers lived not for themselves but for 
us, so we are living for those who will come after us. Be it 
ours so to live that they shall bless God for what we have 
wrought as the servants of his love ; and that age after age, till 
time shall end, may repeat our fathers' words of trust and of 
worship, Qui tkanstulit susteset. 



A CENTQRY OF SELF-GOVERNMENT. 

AN ORATION DELIVERED BY HON. ROBERT C. WINTHROP, 

AT BOSTON, MASS., JULY 4, 1876. 
T 

Again find again, Mr. Mayor and Fellow Citizens, in years 
gone by, considerations or circumstances of some sort, public 
or private, — I know not what, — have prevented my acceptance 
of most kind and flattering invitations to deliver the Oration in 
in this my native city on the Fourth of July. On one of those 
occasions, long, long ago, I am said to have playfully replied to 
the Mayor of that period, that, if I lived to witness this Cen- 
tennial Anniversary, I would not refuse any service which 
might be required of me. That pledge has been recalled 
by others, if not remembered by myself, and by the grace of 
God I am here to-day to fulfil it. I have come at last in obedi- 
ence to your call, to add my name to the distinguished roll of 
those who have discharged this service in unbroken succession 
since the year 1783, when the date of a glorious act of patriots 
was substituted for that of a dastardly deed of hirelings, — the 
4th of July for the 5th of March, — as a day of annual celebration 
by the people of Boston. 

In rising to redeem the promise thus inconsiderately given, I 
may be pardoned for not forgetting, at the outset, who presided 
over the Executive Council of Massachusetts when the Declara- 
tion, which has just been read, was first formally and solemnly 
proclaimed to the people, from the balcony of yonder Old State 
House, on the 18th of July, 177G ;* and whose privilege it was, 
amid the shoutings of the assembled multitude, the ringing of 
the bells, the salute of the surrounding forts, and the firing of 
thirteen volleys from thirteen successive divisions of the Con- 
tinental regiments, drawn up "in correspondence with the num- 
ber of the American States United," to invoke " Stability and 

* James Bowdoin. 



146 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Perpetuity to American Independence ! God save our Ameri- 
can States ! " 

That invocation was not in vain. That wish, that prayer, h;is 
been graciously granted. We are here this day to thank God 
for it. We do thank God for it with all our hearts, and as- 
cribe to Him all the glory. And it would be unnatural if I did 
not feel a more than common satisfaction, that the privilege of 
giving expression to your emotions of joy and gratitude, at this 
hour, should have been assigned to the oldest living descendant 
of him by whom that invocation was uttered, and that prayer 
breathed up to Heaven. 

And if, indeed, in addition to this, — as you, Mr. Mayor, so 
kindly urged in originally inviting me, — the name I bear may 
serve in any sort as a link between the earliest settlement of 
New England, two centuries and a half ago, and the grand 
culmination of that settlement in the Centennial Epoch of 
American Independence, all the less may I be at liberty to 
express anything of the compunction or regret, which I can- 
not but sincerely feel, that so responsible and difficult a task 
had not been imposed upon some more sufficient, or certainly 
upon some younger man. 

Yet what can I say ? What can any one say, here or else- 
where, to-day, which shall either satisfy the expectations of 
others, or meet his own sense of the demands of such an occasion? 
For myself, certainly, the longer I have contemplated it, — the 
more deeply I have reflected on it, — so much the more hopeless 
I have become of finding myself able to give any adequate ex- 
pression to its full significance, its real sublimity and grandeur. 
A hundred -fold more than when John Adams wrote to his 
wife it would be so forever, it is an occasion for "shows, games, 
sports, guns, bells, bonfires, and illuminations, from one end of 
the continent to the other." Ovations rather than orations, are 
the order of such a day as this. Emotions like those which 
ought to fill, and which do fill, all our hearts, call for the swell- 
ing tones of a multitude, the cheers of a mighty crowd, and re- 
fuse to be uttered by any single human voice. The strongest 
phrases seem feeble and powerless ; the best results of historical 
research have the dryness of chaff and husks, and the richest 



ORATION — ROBERT c. WHSTTHROI\ 147 

flowers of rhetoric, the drowsiness of " poppy or mandragora, 
in presence of the simplest statement of the grand consumma- 
tion we are here to celebrate : — A Century of Self-Government 
Completed ! A hundred years of Free Republican Institutions 
realized and rounded out ! An era of Popular Liberty, contin- 
ued and prolonged from generation to generation, until to-day 
it assumes its fall proportions, and asserts its rightful place, 
among the Ages ! 

It is a theme from which an Everett, a Choate, or even a Web- 
ster, might have shrunk. But those voices, alas ! were long 
ago hashed. It is a theme on which any one, living or dead, 
might have been glad to follow the precedent of those few incom- 
parable sentences at Gettysburg, on the 19th of November, 18G3, 
and forbear from all attempt at extended discourse. It is not 
for me, however, to copy that uniqae original, — nor yet to shelter 
myself under an example, which I should in vain aspire to equal. 

And, indeed, Fellow Citizens, some formal words must be 
spoken here to-day, — trite, familiar, commonplace words, though 
they may be ; — some words of commemoration ; some words of 
congratulation; some words of glory to God, and of acknowl- 
edgment to man ; some greatful looking* back ; some hopeful, 
trustful, lookings forward, — these, I am sensible, cannot be 
spared from our great assembly on this Centennial Day. You 
would not pardon me for omitting them. 

But where shall I begin ? To what specific subject shall I turn 
for refuge from the thousand thoughts which come crowding to 
one's mind and rushing to one's lips, all jealous of postponement 
all clamoring for utterance before our Festival shall close, and 
before this Centennial sun shall set? 

The single, simple Act which has made the Fourth of July 
memorable forever, — the mere scene of the Declaration,— would 
of itself and alone supply an ample subject for far more than 
the little hour which I may dare; to occupy ; and, though it has 
been described a hundred times before, in histories and address- 
es, and in countless magazines and journals, it imparatively de- 
mands something more than a cursory allusion here to-day, and 
challenges our attention as it never did before, and hardly ever 
can challenge it again. 



148 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 



II. 



Go back with me, tbeu, for a few moments at least, to that great 
Jefferson, year of our Lord, and that great day of American Liberty. 
Transport yourselves with me, in imagination, to Philadelphia. 
It will require but little effort for any of us to do so, for all our 
hearts are there already. Yes, we are all there, — from the At- 
lantic to the Pacific, from the Lakes to the Gulf, — we are all 
there, at this high noon of our Nation's Birthday, in that beauti- 
ful City of Brotherly Love, rejoicing in all her brilliant displays, 
and partaking in the full enjoyment of all her pageantry and 
pride. Certainly, the birthplace and the burial-place of Frank- 
lin are in cordial sympathy at this hour ; and a common senti- 
ment of congratulation and joy, leaping and vibrating from 
heart to heart, outstrips even the magic swiftness of magnetic 
wires. There are no chords of such elastic reach and such 
electric power as the heartstrings of a mighty Nation, touched 
and tuned, as all our heartstrings are to-day, to the sense of a 
common glory, — throbbing and thrilling with a common exul- 
tation. 

Go with me, then, I say, to Philadelphia ; — not to Philadel- 
phia, indeed, as she is at this moment, with all her bravery on, 
Avith all her beautiful garments around her, with all the graceful 
and generous contributions which so many other Cities and other 
St Mies and other Nations have sent for her adornment, — not 
forgetting those most graceful, most welcome, most touching 
contributions, in view of the precise character of the occasion, 
from Old England herself ; — but go with me to Philadelphia, as 
she was just a hundred years ago. Enter with me her 
noble Independence Hall, so happily restored and conse- 
crated afresh as the Runny mede of our Nation ; and, as we 
enter it, let us not forget to be grateful that no demands of pub- 
lic convenience or expediency have called for the demolition of 
that old State House of Pennsylvania. Observe and watch the 
movements, listen attentively to the words, look steadfastly at 
the countenances of the men who compose the little Congress 
assembled there. Braver, wiser, nobler men have never been 
gathered and grouped under a single roof, before or since, in any 



ORATION — ROBERT C. WINTUROP. 



149 



a^-e, on any soil beneath the sun. What are they doing ? What 
are they daring? Who are they, thus to do, and thus to dare? 
Single out with me, as you easily will at the first glance, by a 
presence and a stature not easily overlooked or mistaken, the 
young, ardent, accomplished Jefferson. He is < »nly just thirty- 
three years of age. Charming in conversation, ready and full 
in council, he is " slow of tongue," like the great Lawgiver of 
the Israelites, for any public discussion or formal discourse. 
But be has brought with him the reputation of wielding what 
John Adams well called " a masterly pen." And grandly has 
he justified that reputation. Grandly has he employed that pen 
already, in drafting a Paper which is at this moment lying on 
the table and awaiting its final signature and sanction. 

Three weeks before, indeed, — on the previous 7th of June, — 
his own noble colleague, Richard Henry Lee, had moved the 
Resolution, whose adoption, on the 2d of July, had virtually 
settled the whole question. Nothing, certainly, more explicit 
or emphatic could have been wanted for that Congress itself 
than that Resolution, setting forth as it did, in language of 
striking simplicity and brevity and dignity, " That these United 
Colonies are, and of right ought to be, Free and Independent 
States ; that they are absolved from all allegiance to the British 
crown, and that all political connection between them and the 
State of Great Britain is, and ought to be, totally dissolved." 

That Resolution was, indeed, not only comprehensive and con- 
clusive enough for the Congress which adopted it, but, I need 
not say, it is comprehensive and conclusive enough for us ; and 
I heartily wish, that, in the century to come, its reading might 
be substituted for that of the longer Declaration which has put 
the patience of our audiences to so severe a test for so many 
years past, — though, happily, not to-day. 

But the form in which that Resolution was to be announced 
and proclaimed to the people of the Colonies, and the reasons 
by which it was to be justified before the world, were at that 
time of intense interest and of momentous importance. No 
graver responsibility was ever devolved upon a young man of 
thirty-three, if, indeed, upon any man of any age, than that of 
preparing such a paper. As often as I have examined the orig- 



150 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

inal draft of that Paper, still extant in the Archives of the State 
Department at Washington, and have observed how very few 
changes were made, or even suggested, by the illustrious men 
associated with its author on the committee for its preparation, 
it has seemed to me to be as marvelous a composition, of its 
kind and for its purpose, as the annals of mankind can show. 
The earliest honors of this day, certainly, may well be paid, here 
and throughout the country, to the young Virginian of " the 
masterly pen." 

And here, by the favor of a highly valued friend and fellow- 
citizen, to whom it was given by Jefferson himself a few months 
only before his death, I am privileged to hold in my hands, and 
to lift up to the eager gaze of you all, a most compact and con- 
venient little mahogany case, which bears this autograph inscrip- 
tion on its face, dated " Monticello, November 18, 1825 :" — 

" Thomas Jefferson gives this Writing Desk to Joseph Coolidge, 
Jun., as a memorial of his affection. It was made from a draw- 
ing of his own, by Ben Randall, Cabinet-maker of Philadelphia, 
with whom he first lodged on his arrival in that City in May, 
177G, and is the indentical one on which he wrote the Declara- 
tion of Independence." 

" Politics, as well as Religion," the incription proceeds to say, 
" has its superstitions. These, gaining strength with time, may, 
one day, give imaginary value to this relic, for its association 
with the birth of the Great Charter of our Independence." 

Superstitions ! Imaginary value ! Not for an instant can we 
admit such ideas. The modesty of the writer has betrayed even 
"the masterly pen.". There is no imaginary value to this relic, 
and no superstition is required to render it as precious and 
priceless a piece of wood, as the secular cabinets of the world 
have ever possessed, or ever claimed to possess. No cabinet- 
maker on earth will have a more enduring name than this in- 
scription has secured to " Ben Randall, ol Philadelphia." No 
pen will have a wider or more lasting fame than his who wrote 
the inscription. The very table at Runnymede, which some of us 
have seen, on which the Magna Charta of England is said to have 
been signed or sealed five centuries and a half before, — even 
were it authenticated by the genuine autographs of every one 



ORATION — ROBERT C. WINTHROP. 151 

of those brave old Barons, with Stephen Langton at their head, 
— who extorted its grand pledges and promises from Xing 
John, — so soon to be violated, — could hardly exceed, could 
hardlv equal, in interest and value, this little mahogany desk. 
What momentous issues for our country, and for mankind, were 
locked up in this narrow drawer, as night after night the rough 
notes of preparation for the Great Paper were laid aside for the 
revision of the morning ! To what anxious thoughts, to what 
careful study of words and phrases, to what cautious weighing 
of statements and arguments, to what deep and almost over- 
whelming impressions of responsibility, it must have been a 
witness! Long may it find its appropriate and appreciating 
ownership in the successive generations of a family, in which 
the blood ot Virginia and Massachusetts is so auspiciously com- 
mingled ! Should it, in the lapse of years, ever pass from the 
hands of those to whom it will be so precious an heirloom, it could 
only have its fit and final place among the choicest and most 
cherished treasures of the Nation, with whose Title Deeds of 
Independence it is so proudly associated! 

But the young Jefferson is not alone from Virginia, on the day 
we are celebrating, in the Hall which we have entered as imag- 
inary spectators of the scene. His venerated friend and old 
legal preceptor, — George Wythe, — is, indeed, temporarily absent 
from his side ; and even Richard Henry Lee, the original mover 
of the measure, and upon whom it might have devolved to draw 
up the Declaration, has been called home by dangerous illness 
in his family, and is not there to help him. But "the gay, 
good-humored '' Francis Lightfoot Lee, a younger brother, is 
there. Benjamin Harrison, the father of our late President 
Harrison, is there, and has just reported the Declaration from 
the Committee of the Whole, of which he was Chairman. The 
" mild and philanthropic " Carter Braxton is there, in the place 
of the lamented Peyton Randolph, the first President of the 
Continental Congress, who had died, to the sorrow of the whole 
country, six or seven months before. And the noble-hearted 
Thomas Nelson is there, — the largest subscriber to the generous 
relief sent from Virginia to Boston during the sore distress oc- 
casioned by the shutting up of our Port, and who was the mover 



152 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

of those Instructions in the Convention of Virginia, passed on 
the 15th of May, under which Richard Henry Lee offered the 
original resolution of Independence, on the 7th of June. 

I am particular, Fellow Citizens, in giving to the Old Domin- 
ion the foremost place in this rapid survey of the Fourth of 
July, 177G, and in naming every one of her delegates who par- 
ticipated in that day's doings ; for it is hardly too much to say, 
that the destinies of our country, at that period, hung and 
hinged upon her action, and upon the action of her great and 
glorious sons. Without Virginia, as we must all acknowledge, 
without her Patrick Henry among the people, her Lees and 
Jefferson in the forum, and her Washington in the field, — I will 
not say, that the cause of American Liberty and American In- 
dependence must have been ultimately defeated, — no, no ; there 
was no ultimate defeat for that causa in the decrees of the Most 
High ! — but it must have been delayed, postponed, perplexed, 
and to many eyes and to many hearts rendered seemingly hope- 
less. It was Union which assured our Independence, and there 
could have been no Union without the influence and coopera- 
tion of that great leading Southern Colony. To-day, then, as 
we look back oVer the wide gulf of a century, we are ready and 
glad to forget every thing of alienation, every thing of contention 
and estrangement, which has intervened, and to hail her once 
more, as our Fathers in Faneuil Hall hailed her, in 1775, as 
" our noble, patriotic sister Colony, Virginia." 

I may not attempt, on this occasion, to speak with equal par- 
ticularity of all the other delegates whom we see assembled in 
that immortal Congress. Their names are all inscribed where 
they can never be obliterated, never be forgotten. Yet some 
others of them so challenge our attention and rivet our gaze, as 
we look in upon that old time-honored Hall, that I cannot pass 
to other topics without a brief allusion to them. 

III. 

Who can overlook or mistake the sturdy front of Roger Sher- 
shermanand man, whom we are proud to recall as a native of Mas- 
Hancock, gaclrusetts, though now a delegate from Connecticut, 
— that " Old Puritan," as John Adams well said, " as honest as 



ORATION HOBEET C. WINTHKOP. 153 

an angel, and as firm in the cause of American Independence as 
Mount Atlas," represented most worthily to-day by the distin- 
guished Orator of the Centennial at Philadelphia, as well as by 
more than one distinguished grandson in our own State ? 

Who can overlook or mistake the stalwart figure of Samuel 
Chase, of Maryland, " of ardent passions, of strong mind, of do- 
mineering temper, of a turbulent and boisterous life," who had 
helped to burn in effigy the Maryland Stamp Distributor eleven 
years before, and who, we are told by one who knew what he 
was saying, " must ever be conspicuous in the catalogue of that 
Congress ? " 

His milder and more amiable colleague, Charles Carroll, was 
engaged at that moment in pressing the cause of Independence 
on the hesitating Convention of Maryland, at Annapolis ; and 
though, as we shall see, he signed the Declaration on the 2d of 
August, and outlived all his compeers on that roll of glory, he 
is missing from the illustrious band as we look in upon them 
this morning. I cannot but remember that it was my privilege 
to see and know that venerable person in my early manhood. 
Entering his drawing-room, nearly five-and-forty years ago, I 
found him reposing on a sofa and covered with a shawl, and 
was not even aware of his presence, so shrunk and shrivelled by 
the lapse of years was his originally feeble frame. Quot libras 
in duce summo ! But the little heap on the sofa was soon seen 
stirring, and, rousing himself from his mid-day nap, he rose and 
greeted me with a courtesy and grace which I can never forget. 
In the ninety-fifth year of his age, as he was, and within a few 
months of his death, it is not surprising that there should be 
little for me to recall of that interview, save his eager inquiries 
about James Madison, whom I had just visited at Montpelier, 
and his affectionate allusions to John Adams, who had gone be- 
fore him ; and save, too, the exceeding satisfaction for myself of 
having seen and pressed the hand of the last surviving signer of 
the Declaration. 

But Csesar Rodney, who had gone home on the same patriotic 
errand which had called Carroll to Maryland, had hajypily re- 
turned in season, and had come in, two days before, " in his 
boots and spurs," to give the casting vote for Delaware in favor 
of Independence. 



154 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

And there is Arthur Middleton, of South Carolina, the bosom 
friend of our own Hancock, and who is associated with him 
under the same roof in those elegant hospitalities which helped 
to make men know and understand and trust each other. And 
with him you may see and almost hear the eloquent Edward 
Butledge, who not long before had united with John Adams and 
Kichard Henry Lee in urging on the several Colonies the great 
measure of establishing permanent governments at once for 
themselves, —a decisive step which we may not forget that 
South Carolina was among the very earliest in taking. She 
took it, however, with a reservation, and her delegates were not 
quite ready to vote for Independence, when it was first proposed. 

But Kichard Stockton, of New Jersey, must not be unmarked 
or unmentioned in our rapid survey, more especially as it is a 
matter of record that his original doubts about the measure, 
which he is now bravely supporting, had been dissipated and 
dispelled " by the irresistable and conclusive arguments of John 
Adams." 

And who requires to be reminded that our " Great Bostonian." 
Benjamin Franklin, is at his post to-day, representing his 
adopted Colony with less support than he could wish, — for Penn- 
sylvania, as well as New York, was sadly divided, and at times 
almost paralyzed by her divisions,-but with patriotism and firm- 
ness and prudence and sagacity and philosophy and wit and 
common-sense and courage enough to constitutue a whole dele- 
gation, and to represent a whole Colony, by himself! He is the 
last man of that whole glorious group of Fifty, — or it may have 
been one or two more, or one or two less, than fifty, — who re- 
quires to be pointed out, in order to be the observed of all ob- 
servers. 

But I must not stop here. It is fit, above all other things, 
that, while we do justice to the great actors in this scene from 
other Colonies, we should not overlook the delegates from our 
own Colony. It is fit, above all things, that we should recall 
something more than the names of the men who represented 
Massachusetts in that great Assembly, and who boldly affixed 
their signatures, in her behalf, to that immortal Instrument. 

Was there ever a more signal distinction vouchsafed to mor- 



ORATION ROBERT C. WINTHROP. 155 

taJ man than that which was won and worn by John Hancock 
a hundred years ago to-day? Not altogether a great man ; 
not without some grave defects of character ; — we remember 
nothing at this hour save his Presidency of the Congress of the 
Declaration, and his bold and noble signature to our Magna 
Charta. Behold him in the chair which is still standing in its 
old place, — the very same chair in which "Washington was to sit, 
eleven years later, as President of the Convention which framed 
the Constitution of the United States ; the very same chair, 
emblazoned on the bach of which Franklin was to descry " a 
rising and not a setting sun," when that Constitution had been 
finally adopted, — behold him, the young Boston merchant, not 
yet quite forty years of age, not only with a princely fortune at 
stake, but with a price at that moment on his own head, sitting 
there to-day in all the calm composure and dignity which so 
peculiarly characterized him, and which nothing seemed able 
to relax or ruffle. He had chanced to come on to the Congress 
during the previous year, just as Peyton Randolph had been 
compelled to relinquish his seat and go home, — returning only 
to die ; and, having been unexpectedly elected as his successor, 
he hesitated about taking his seat. But grand old Benjamin 
Harrison, of Virginia, we are told, was standing beside him, 
and with the ready good humor that loved a joke even in the 
Senate House, he seized the modest candidate in his athletic 
arms, and placed him in the presidential chair ; then, turning 
to some of the members around, he exclaimed : " We will show 
Mother Britain how little we care for her, by making a Massa- 
chusetts man our President, whom she has excludfc from par- 
don by a public proclamation." 

Behold him ! He has risen for a moment. He has put the 
question. The Declaration is adopted. It is already late in 
the evening, and all formal promulgation of the day's doings 
must be postponed. After a grace of three days, the air will be 
vibrating with the joyous tones of the Old Bell in the cupola 
over his head, proclaiming Liberty to all mankind, and with the 
responding acclamations of assembled multitudes. Meantime, 
for him, however, a simple but solemn duty remains to be dis- 
charged. The paper is before him. You may see the very 



15G OUli NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

table on which it was laid, and the very inkstand which awaits 
his use. No hesitation now. lie dips his pen, and with au un- 
trembling hand proceeds to execute a signature, which would 
seem to have been studied in the schools, and practised in the 
counting-room, and shaped and modelled day by day in the 
correspondence of mercantile and political manhood, until it 
should be meet for the authentication of some immortal act ; 
and which, as Webstar grandly said, has made his name as im- 
perishable " as if it were written between Orion and the Plei- 
ades." 

Under that signature, with only the attestation of a secre- 
tary, the Declaration goes forth to the American people, to be 
printed in their journals, to be proclaimed in their streets, to 
be published from their pulpits, to be read at the head of their 
armies, to be incorporated forever in their history. The British 
forces, driven away from Boston, are now landing on Staten 
Island, and the reverses of Long Island are just awaiting us. 
They were met by the promulgation of this act of offence and 
d( fiance to all royal authority. But there was no individual 
responsibility for that act, save in the signature of John Han- 
cock, President, and Charles Thomson, Secretary. Not until 
the 2d of August was our young Boston merchant relieved from 
the perilous, the appalling grandeur of standing sole sponsor 
for the revolt of Thirteen Colonies and Three Millions of peo- 
ple. Sixteen or seventeen years before, as a very young man, 
he had made a visit to London, and was present at the burial of 
George II., and at the coronation of George III. He is now 
not only the Witness but the instrument, and in some sort the 
impersonation, of a far more substantial change of dynasty on 
his own soil, the burial of royalty under any and every title, 
and the coronation of a Sovereign, whose sceptre has already 
endured for a century, and whose sway has already embraced 
three times thirteen States, and more than thirteen times three 
million of people ! 

Ah, if his quaint, picturesque, charming old mansion-house, 
so long the gem of Beacon Street, could have stood till this 
day, our Centennial decorations and illuminations might haply 
have so marked, and sanctified, and glorified it, that the rage of 



ORATION— HOBERT C. WlNTHROP. 157 

reconstruction would have passed over it still longer, and spared 
it for the reverent gaze of other generations. But his own 
name and fame are secure ; and, whatever may have been the 
foibles or faults of his later years, to-day we will remember that 
momentous and matchless signature, and him who made it, 
with nothing but respect, admiration and gratitude. 

IV. 

But Hancock, as I need not remind you, was not the only pro- 
Samuei and John scribed patriot who represented Massachusetts at 
Adams. Philadelphia on the day we are commemorating. His 
asssociate in General Gage's memorable exception from pardon 
is close at his side. He who, as a Harvard College student, in 
1743, had maintained the affirmative of the Thesis, " Whether it 
be lawful to resist the Supreme Magistrate, if the Commonwealth 
cannot otherwise be preserved," and who, during those whole three 
and thirty years since had been training up himself and train- 
ing up his fellow-countrymen in the nurture and admonition of 
the Lord and of Liberty ; — he who had replied to Gage's recom- 
mendation to him to make his peace with the King, " I trust I 
have long since made my peace with the King of Kings, and 
no personal considerations shall induce me to abandon the 
righteous cause of my country ; '' — he who had drawn up the 
Boston Instructions to her Representatives in the General 
Court, adopted at Faneuil Hall, on the 24th of May, 1764, — the 
earliest protest against the Stamp Act, and one of the grandest 
papers of our whole Revolutionary period ; — he who had insti- 
tuted and organized those Committees of Correspondence, with- 
out which we could have had no united counsels, no concerted 
action, no union, no success : — he who, after the massacre of 
March 5, 1770, had demanded so heroically the removal from 
Boston of the British regiments, ever afterwards known as 
" Sam. Adams's regiments," — telling the Governor to his face, 
with an emphasis and an eloquence which were hardly ever ex- 
ceeded since Demosthenes stood on the Bema, or Paul on Mars 
Hill, "If the Lieutenant-governor, or Colonel Dalrymple, or 
both together, have authority to remove one regiment, they 
have authority to remove two ; and nothing short of the total 



lt)S OITR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

evacuation of the Town, by all the regular troops, will satisfy 
the public mind or preserve the peace of the Province ;" — he. 
" the Palinurus of the American Revolution," as Jefferson once 
called him, but — thank Heaven ! — a Palinurus who was never 
put to sleep at the helm, never thrown into* the sea, but who is 
still watching the compass and the stars, and steering the ship 
as she enters at last the haven he has so long yearned for : — the 
veteran Samuel Adams, — the disinterested, inflexible, incor- 
ruptible statesman, — is second to no one in that whole Con- 
gress, hardly second to any one in the whole thirteen Colonies. 
in his claim to the honors and grateful acknowledgements of 
this hour. We have just gladly hailed his statue on its way to 
the capitol. 

Nor must the name of Robert Treat Paine be forgotten 
among the five delegates of Massachusetts in that Hall of Inde- 
pendence, a hundred years ago to-day ; — an able lawyer, a 
learned judge, a just man ; connected by marriage, if I mistake 
not, Mr. Mayor, with your own gallant grandfather, General 
Cobb, and who himself inherited the blood and illustrated the 
virtues of the hero and statesman whose name he bore, — Ro- 
bert Treat, a most distinguished officer in King Philip's War, 
and afterwards a worthy Governor of Connecticut. 

And with him, too, is Elbridge Gerry, the very youngest 
member of the whole Continental Congress, just thirty-two 
years of age, — who had been one of the chosen friends of our 
proto-martyr, General Joseph Warren ; who was with Warren, 
at Watertown, the very last night before he fell at Bunker Hill, 
and into whose ear that heroic volunteer, had whispered those 
memorable words of presentiment, " Dulce et decorum est pro 
patria mori ;" who lived himself to serve his Commonwealth and 
the Nation, ardently and efficiently, at home and abroad, ever in 
accordance with his own patriotic injunction, — " It is the duty 
of every citizen, though he may have but one day to live, to de- 
vote that day to the service of his country," — and died on his 
way to his post as Vice-President of the United States. 

One more name is still to be pronounced. One more star of 
that little Massachusetts cluster is still to be observed an d noted. 
And it is one, which, on the precise occasion we commemorate, 



ORATION ROBERT 0. WINTHROf. 159 

—one, which during those great days of June and July, 1776, 
on which the question of Independence was immediately dis- 
cussed and decided, — had hardly " a fellow in the firmament," 
and which was certainly " the bright, particular star" of our own 
constellation. You will all have anticipated me in naming John 
Adams. Beyond all doubt, his is the Massachusetts name most 
prominently associated with the immediate Day we celebrate. 

Others may have been earlier or more active than he in pre- 
paring the way. Others may have labored longer and more 
zealously to instruct the popular mind and inflame the popular 
heart for the great step which was now to be taken. Others 
may have been more ardent, as they unquestionably were more 
prominent, in the various stages of the struggle, against Writs 
of Assistance, and Stamp Acts, and Tea Taxes. But from the 
date of that marvelous letter of his to Nathan Webb, in 1755, 
when he was less than twenty years old, he seems to have fore- 
cast the destinies of this continent as few other men of any age, 
at that day, had done ; while from the moment at which the 
Continental Congress took the question of Independence fairly 
in hand, as a question to be decided and acted on, until they 
had brought it to its final issue, in the Declaration, his was the 
voice, above and before all other voices, which commanded the 
ears, convinced the minds, and inspired the hearts of his collea- 
gues, and triumphantly secured the result. 

I need not speak of him in other relations or in after years. 
His long life of varied and noble service to his country, in 
almost every sphere of public duty, domestic and foreign, be- 
longs to history ; and history has long ago taken it in charge. 
But the testimony which was borne to its grand efforts and ut- 
ter inces, by the author of the Declaration himself, can never be 
gainsaid, never be weakened, never be forgotten. That testi- 
mony, old as it is, familiar as it is, belongs to this day. John 
Adams will be remembered and honored for ever, in every true 
American heart, as the acknowledged Champion of Indepen- 
dence in the Continental Congress," — " coming out with a 
power which moved us from our seats," — our Colossus on the 
floor." 

And when we recall the circumstances ol kis death— iht ^*Ar, 



160 our National Jubilee. 

the day, the hour, — and the last words upon his dying lips, 
" Independence forever," — who can help feeling that there was 
soine mysterious tie holding back his heroic spirit from the skies, 
until it should be set free amid the exulting shouts of his 
country's first National Jubilee ! 

But not his heroic spirit alone ! 

In this rapid survey of the men assembled at Philadelphia a 
hundred years ago to-day, I began with Thomas Jefferson, of 
Virginia, and I end with John Adams, of Massachusetts ; and 
no one can hesitate to admit that, under God, they were the 
very alpha and omega of that day's doings, — the pen and 
the tongue, — the masterly author, and the no less masterly ad- 
vocate, of the Declaration. 

V. 

And now, my friends, what legend of ancient Rome or Greece 
The statesmen, or Egypt, what myth of prehistoric mythology, what 
story of Herodotus, or fable of iEsop, or metamorphosis of Ovid, 
would ha^e seemed more fabulous and mythical, — did it rest on 
any remote or doubtful traditions, and had not so many of us 
lived to be startled, and thrilled and awed by it, — than the fact, 
that these two men, under so many different circumstances and 
surroundings of age and constitution and climate, widely dis- 
tant from each other, living alike in quiet neighborhoods, remote 
from the smoke and stir of cities, and long before railroads or 
telegraphs had made any advances towards the annihilation or 
abridgement of space, should have been released to their rest 
and summoned to the skies, not only on the same day, but that 
day the Fourth of July, and that Fourth of July the . Fiftieth 
Anniversary of that great declaration which they had contended 
for and carried through so triumphantly side by side ! 

What an emphasis Jefferson would have given to his inscrip- 
tion on this little desk, — " Politics as well as Religion, has its 
superstitions," — could he have foreseen the close even of his 
own life, much more the simultaneous close of these two lives, 
on that Day of Days ! Oh, let me not admit the idea of super- 
stition ! Let me rather reverently say, as Webster said at the 
time in that magnificent Eulogy which left so little fur any one 



ORATION — EGBERT C. WINTHROP. 161 

else to say as to tlie lives or deaths of Adams and Jefferson -. 
•• As their lives themselves were the gifts of Providence, who is 
not willing to recognize in their happy termination, as well as 
in their long continuance, proofs that our country and its bene- 
factors are objects of His care ? " 

And now another Fifty Years have passed away, and we are 
holding our high Centennial Festival ; and still that most 
striking, most impressive most memorable coincidence in all 
American history, or even in the authentic records of mankind, 
is without a visible monument anywhere ! 

In the interesting little city of Weimar, renowned as the resort 
and residence of more than one of the greatest philosophers and 
poets of Germany, many a traveller must have seen and admired 
the charming statues of Goethe and Schiller, standing side by 
side and hand in hand, on a single pedestal, and offering, as it 
were, the laurel wreath of literary priority or pre-eminence to 
each other. Few nobler works of art, in conception or execu- 
tion, can be found on the Continent of Europe. And what 
could be a worthier or juster commemoration of the marvelous 
coincidence of which I have just spoken, and of the men who 
were the subjects of it, and of the Declaration with which, alike 
in their lives ami in their deaths, they are so peculiarly and so 
signally associated, then just such a Monument, with the statues 
of Adams and Jefferson, side by side and hand in hand, upon 
the same base, pres. ing upon each other, in mutual acknowl- 
edgement and deference, the victor palm of a triumph for 
which they must ever be held in common and equal honor ! It 
would be a new tie between Massachusetts and Virginia. It 
would be a new bond of that Union which is the safety and 
the glory of both. It would be a new pledge of that restored 
good-will between the North and South, which is the herald 
and harbinger of a second Century of National Independence. 
It would be a fit recognition of the great Hand of God in our 
history ! 

At all events, it is one of the crying omissions and neglects 
which reproach us all this day, that " glorious old John Adams" 
is without any proportionate public monument in the State of 
which he was one of the very grandest citizens and sons, and 



162 OtJR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

in whose behalf he rendered such inestimable services to his 
country. It is almost ludicrous to look around and see who has 
been commemorated, and he neglected! He might be seen 
standing alone, as he knew so well how to stand alone in life. 
He might be seen grouped with his illustrious son, only second 
to himself in his claims on the omitted posthumous honors of 
his native State. Or, if the claim of noble women to such com- 
memorations were ever to be recognized on our soil, he might 
be lovingly grouped with that incomparable wife, from whom 
he was so often separated by public duties and personal dan- 
gers, and whose familiar correspondence with him, and his with 
her, furnishes a picture of fidelity and affection, and of patriotic 
zeal and courage and self-sacrifice, almost without a parallel in 
our Revolutionary Annals. 

But before all other statues, let us have those of Adams and 
Jefferson on a single block, as they stood together just a hun- 
dred years ago to-day, — as they were translated together just 
fifty years ago to-day : — foremost for Independence in their 
lives, and in their deaths not divided ! Next, certainly, to the 
completion of the National Monument to Washington, at the 
capital, this double statue of this " double star " of the Declar- 
ation calls for the contributions of a patriotic people. It would 
have something of special appropriateness as the first gift to 
that Boston Park, which is to date from tins Centennial Period. 

I have felt, Mr. Mayor and Fellow Citizens, as I am sure you 
all must feel, that the men who were gathered at Philadelphia a 
hundred years ago to-day, familiar as their names and then' 
story may be, to ourselves and to all the world, had an impera- 
tive claim to the first and highest honors of this Centennial Anni- 
versary. But, having paid these passing tributes to their mem- 
ory, I hasten to turn to considerations less purely personal. 

The Declaration has been adopted, and has been sent forth 
in a hundred journals, and on a thousand broadsides, to every 
camp and council-chamber, to every town and village and ham- 
let and fireside, throughout the colonies. What was it? What 
did it declare ? What was its rightful interpretation and inten- 
tions? Under what circumstances was it adopted? What did 
it accomplish for ourselves and for mankind ? 



ORATION — ROBERT C. WINTHROP. 1G3 

A recent and powerful writer on " The growth of the Eng- 
lish Constitution," whom I had the pleasure of meeting at the 
Commencement of Old Cambridge University two years ago, 
says most strikingly and most justly : " There are certain great 
political documents, each of which forms a landmark in our 
political history. There is the Great Charter, the Petition of 
Eights, the Bill of Rights." " But not one of them," he adds, 
" gave itself out as the enactment of anything new. All claim- 
ed to set forth, with new strength, it might be, and with new 
clearness, those rights of Englishmen, which were already old." 
The same remark has more recently been incorporated into "A 
Short History of the English People." "In itself," says the 
writer of that admirable little volume, " the Charter was no 
novelty, nor did it claim to establish any new Constitutional 
principles. The Charter of Henry I. formed the basis of the 
whole ; and the additions to it are, for the most part, formal 
recognitions of the judicial and administrative changes intro- 
duced by Henry II." 

So, substantially, — so, almost precisely, — it may be said of 
the Great American Charter, which was drawn up by Thomas 
Jefferson on the precious little desk which lies before me. It 
made no pretensions to novelty. The men of 1776 were not in 
any sense, certainly not in any seditious sense, greedy of nov- 
elties, — "avidi novarum irrxim." They had claimed nothing 
new. They desired nothing new. Their old original rights as 
Englishmen were all that they sought to enjoy, and those they 
resolved to vindicate. It was the invasion and denia of those old 
rights of Enlishmen, which they resisted and revolted from. 

As our excellent fellow-citizen, Mr. Dana, so well said pub- 
licly at Lexington, last year, — and as we should all have been 
glad to have him in the way of repeating quietly in London, 
this year, — " We were not the Revolutionists. The King and 
Parliament were the Revolutionists. They were the radical in- 
novators. We were the conservators of existing institutions." 

No one has forgotten, or can ever forget, how early and how 
emphatically all this was admitted by some of the grandest 
statesmen and orators of England herself. It was the attempt 
to subvert our rights as Englishmen, which roused Chatham to 






154 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

some of his most majestic efforts. It was the attempt to subvert 
our rights as Englishmen, which kindled Burke to not a few of 
his most brilliant utterances. It was the attempt to subvert our 
rights as Englishmen, which inspired Barre and Conway and 
Camden with appeals and arguments and phrases, which will 
keep their memories fresh when all else associated with them is 
forgotten. The names of all three of them, as you well know, 
have long been the cherished designations of American Towns. 

They all perceived and understood that we were contending 
for English rights, and against the violation of the great princi- 
ples of English liberty. Nay, not a few of them perceived and 
understood that we were fighting their battles as well as our 
own, and that the liberties of Englishmen upon their own soil 
were virtually involved in our cause and in our contest. 

There is a most notable letter of Josiah Quincy, Jr.'s, written 
from London at the end of 1 774,— a few months only before that 
young patriot returned to die so sadly within sight of his native 
shores, — in which he tells his wife, to whom he was not likely 
to write for any mere sensational effect, that " some of the first 
characters for understanding, integrity, and spirit," whom he had 
met in London, had used language of this sort : " This Nation 
is lost. Corruption and the influence of the Crown have led us 
into bondage, and a Standing Army has riveted our chains. To 
America only can we look for salvation. 'Tis America only can 
save England. Unite and persevere. You must prevail— you 
must triumph." Quincy was careful not to betray names, in a 
letter which might be intercepted before it reached its destina- 
tion. But we know the men with whom he had been brought 
into association by Franklin and other friends, — men like Shel- 
burne and Hartley and Pownall and Priestley and Brand Hollis 
and Sir George Saville, to say nothing of Burke and Chatham. 
The language was not lost upon us. We did unite and perse- 
vere. "We did prevail and triumph. And it is hardly too much 
to say that we did " save England." We saved her from her- 
self ; — saved her from being the successful instrument of over- 
throwing the rights of Englishmen ; — saved her "from the 
poisoned chalice which would have been commended to her own 
lips;" — saved her from "the bloody instructions which would 



ORATION ROBERT 0. WTNTHROP. 165 

have returned to plague the inventor." Not only was it true, 
as Lord Macaulay said in one of his brilliant Essays, that "Eng- 
land was never so rich, so great, so formidable to foreign princes, 
so absolutely mistress of the seas, as since the alienation of her 
American Colonies;" but it is not less true that England came 
out of that contest with new and larger views of Liberty; with 
a broader and deeper sense of what was due to human rights ; 
and with an experience of incalculable value to her in the man- 
agement of the vast Colonial System which remained, or was 
iu store, for her. 

A vast and gigantic Colonial System, beyond all doubt, it has 
proved to be ! She was just entering, a hundred years ago, on 
that wonderful career of conquest in the East, which was to 
compensate her, — if it were a compensation, — for her impend- 
ing losses in the West. Her gallant Cornwallis was soon to 
receive the jewelled Sword of Tippoo Saib at Bangalore, in ex- 
change for that which he was now destined to surrender to 
Washington at Yorktown. It is certainly not among the least 
striking coincidences of our Centennial Year, that, at the very 
moment when we are celebrating the event which stripped 
Great Britain of thirteen Colonies and three millions of sub- 
jects, — now grown into thirty-eight States and more than forty 
millions of people, — she is welcoming the return of her amiable 
and genial Prince from a royal progress through the wide- 
spread regions of " Ormus and of Ind," bringing back, to lay 
at the foot of the British throne, the homage of nine principal 
Provinces and a hundred and forty-eight feudatory States, and 
of not less than two hundred and forty millions of people, from 
Ceylon to the Himalayas, and affording ample justification for 
the Queen's new title of Empress of India ! Among all the 
parallelisms of modern history, there are few more striking and 
impressive than this. 

The American Colonies never quarrelled or cavilled about the 
titles of their Sovereign. If, as has been said, " they went to 
war about a preamble," it was not about the preamble of the 
royal name. It was the Imperial power, the more than Im- 
perial pretensions and usurpations, which drove them to rebel- 
lion. The Declaration was, in its own terms, a personal and 



xbb OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

most stringent arraignment of the King. It could have been 
nothing else. George TIL was to us the sole responsible instru- 
ment of oppression. Parliament had, indeed, sustained him ; 
but the Colonies had never admitted the authority of a Parlia- 
ment in which they had no representation. There is no pas- 
sage in Mr. Jefferson's paper more carefully or more felicitously 
worded than that in which he says of the Sovereign, that "he 
has combined with oilier* to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign 
to our constitu'ions and unacknowledged by our laws, — giving 
his assent to their acts of pretended legislation" A slip of " the 
masterly pen'' on this point might have cost us our consistency ; 
but that pen was on its guard, and this is the only allusion to 
Lords or Commons. We could recognize no one but the Mon- 
arch. We could contend with nothing less than Royalty. We 
could separate ourselves only from the Crown. English prece- 
dents had abundantly taught us that kings were not beyond the 
reach of arraignment and indictment ; and arraignment and 
indictment were then our only means of justifying our cause to 
ourselves and to the world. Yes ; harsh, severe, stinging, scold- 
ing, — J had almost said, — as that long series of allegations and 
accusations may sound, and certainly does sound, as we read 
it, or listen to it, in cold blood, a century after the issues are all 
happily settled, it was a temperate and a dignified utterance, 
under the circumstances of the case, and breathed quite enough 
of moderation to be relished or accepted by those who were 
bearing the brunt of so terrible a struggle for life and liberty 
and all that was dear to them, as that which those issues in- 
volved. Nor in all that bitter indictment is there a single count 
which does not refer to, and rest upon, some violation of the 
rights of Englishmen, or some violation of the rights of hu- 
manity. We stand by the Declaration, to-day and always, and 
disavow nothing of its reasoning or its rhetoric. 

And, after all, Jefferson was not a whit more severe on the 
King than Chatham had been on the King's Ministers sis 
months before, when he told them to their faces : "The whole 
of your political conduct has been one continued series of weak- 
ness, temerity, despotism, ignorance, futility, negligence, blun- 
dering, and the most notorious servility, incapacity and corrup- 



ORATION — ROBERT C. WINTHROP. 16T 

tion." Nor was William Pitt, the younger, much more mea- 
sured in his language, at a later period of our struggle, when 
he declared : "These Ministers will destroy the empire they 
were called upon to save, before the indignation of a great and 
suffering people can fall upon their heads in the punishment 
which they deserve. I affirm the war to have been a most ac- 
cursed, wicked, barbarous, cruel, unnatural, unjust, and dia- 
bolical war." 

I need not say, Fellow Citizens, that we are here to indulge 
in no reproaches upon Old England to-day, as we look back 
from the lofty heights of a Century of Independence on the 
course of events which severed us from her dominions. We are 
by no means in the mood to re-open the adjudications of Ghent 
or of Geneva ; nor can we allow the ties of old traditions to be 
seriously jarred, on such an occasion as this, by any recent fail- 
ures of extraditions, however vexatious or provoking. But, cer- 
tainly, resentments on either side, for any thing said or done 
during our Eevolutionary period, — after such a lapse of time, 
would dishonor the hearts which cherished them, and the 
tongues which uttered them. Who wonders that George the 
Third would not let such Colonies as ours go without a struggle ? 
They were the brightest jewels of his crown. Who wonders 
that he shrunk from the responsibility of such a dismemberment 
of his empire, and that his brain reeled at the very thought of it ? 
It would have been a poor compliment to us, had he not con- 
sidered us worth holding at any and every cost. We should 
hardly have forgiven him, had he not desired to retain us. Nor 
can we altogether wonder that with the views of kingly prerog_ 
ative which belonged to that period, and in which he was edu- 
cated, he should have preferred the policy of coercion to that of 
conciliation, and should have insisted on sending over troops to 
subdue us. 

Our old Mother Country has had, indeed, a peculiar destiny 
and in many respects a glorious one. Not alone with her drum 
beat, as Webster so grandly said, has she encircled the earth. 
Not alone with her martial airs has she kept company with the 
hours. She has carried civilization and Christianity wherever 
she has carried her flag. She has carried her noble tongue, 






168 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

with all its incomparable treasures of literature and science and 
religion, around the globe ; and, with our aid, — for she will con- 
fess that we are doing our full part in this line of extension, — 
it is fast becoming the most pervading speech of civilized 
man. We thank God at this hour, and at every hour, that 
" Chatham's language is our mother tongue," and that we have 
an inherited and an indisputable share in the glory of so many 
of the great names by which that language has been illustrated 
and adorned. 

But she has done more than all this. She has planted the 
groat institutions and principles of civil freedom in every lati- 
tude where she could find a foothold. From her our Kevolu- 
tionary Fathers learned to understand and value them, and from 
her they inherited the spirit to defend them. Not in vain had 
her brave barons extorted Magna Charta from King John. Not 
in vain had her Simon de Montfort summoned the knights and 
burgesses, and laid the foundations of a Parliament and a Housa 
of Commons. Not in vain had her noble Sir John Eliot died as 
the martyr of free speech in the tower. Not in vain had her 
heroic Hampden resisted ship-money, and died on the battle- 
field. Not in vain for us, certainly, the great examples and the 
great warnings of Cromwell, and the Commonwealth, or those 
sadder ones of Sidney and Russell, or that later and more 
glorious one still of William of Orange. 

The grand lessons of her own history, forgotten, overlooked, 
or resolutely disregarded, it may be, on her own side of the 
Atlantic, in the days we are commemorating, were the very in- 
spiration of her Colonies on this side; and under that inspiration 
they contended and conquered. And though she may some- 
times be almost tempted to take sadly upon her lips the words 
of the old prophet, — " I have nourished and brought up child- 
dren, and they have rebelled against me," — she has long ago 
learned that such a rebellion as ours was really in her own 
interest, and for her own ultimate welfare; begun, continued, 
and ended, as it was, in vindication of the liberties of English- 
men. 

I cannot forget how justly and eloquently my friend, Dr. 
Ellis, a few months ago, in this same hall, gave expression to 



ORATION— ROBERT C. WINTHROP. 169 

the respect which is so widely entertained on this side of the 
Atlantic for the Sovereign Lady who has now graced the British 
throne for nearly forty years. No passage of his admirable 
Oration elicited a warmer response from the multitudes who 
listened to him. How much of the growth and grandeur of 
Great Britian is associated with the names of illustrious women! 
Even those of us who have no fancy for female suffrage might 
often be well-nigh tempted to take refuge, from the incompe- 
tencies and intrigues and corruptions of men, under the presi- 
dency of the purer and gentler sex. What would English 
history be without the names of Elizabeth and Anne ! What 
would it be without the name of Victoria, — of whom it has 
recently been written, " that, by a long course of loyal acquies- 
cence in the declared wishes of her people, she has brought 
about what is nothing less than a great revolution, — all the 
more beneficent because it has been gradual and silent ! " Ever 
honored be her name, and that of her lamented consort ! 

" Ever beloved and loving may her rule be; 
And when old Time shall lead her to her end, 
Goodness and she fill up one monument! " 

The Declaration is adopted and promulgated; but we may 
not forget how long and how serious a reluctance there had 
been to take the irrevocable step. As late as September, 1774, 
Washington had publicly declared his belief that Independence 
" was wished by no thinking man." As late as the 6th of 
March, 1775, in his memorable Oration in the Old South, with 
all the associations of " the Boston Massacre " fresh in his 
heart, Warren had declared that " Independence was not our 
aim." As late as July, 1775, the letter of the Continental Con- 
gress to the Lord Mayor and Corporation of London had said: 
"North America, my Lord, wishes most ardently for a lasting 
connection with Great Britian, on terms of just and equal 
liberty;" and a simultaneous humble petition to the King ? 
signed by every member of the Congress, reiterated the same 
assurance. And as late as the 25th of August, 1775, Jefferson - 
himself, in a letter to the John Randolph of that day, speaking 
of those who " still wish for reunion with their parent country," 
says most emphatically, " I am one of those; and would rather 



170 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

be in dependence on Great Britian, properly limited, than on 
any nation on earth; or than on no nation." Not all the blood 
of Lexington, and Concord, and Bunker Hill, crying from the 
ground long before these words were written, had extinguished 
the wish for reconciliation and reunion even in the heart of the 
very author of the Declaration. 

Tell me not, tell me not, that there was any thing of equivo- 
cation, any thing of hypocrisy, in these and a hundred other 
similar expressions which might be cited. The truest human 
hearts are full of such inconsistency and hypocrisy as that. 
The dearest friends, the tenderest relatives, are never more over- 
flowing and outpouring, nor ever more sincere, in feelings and 
expressions of devotion and love, than when called to contem- 
plate some terrible impending necessity of final separation and 
divorce. The ties between us and Old England could not be 
sundered without sadness, and sadness on both sides of the 
ocean. Franklin, albeit his eyes were " unused to the melting 
mood," is recorded to have wept as he left England, in view 
of the inevitable result of which he was coming home to be a 
witness and an instrument ; and I have heard from the poet 
Rogers's own lips, what man of you may have read in his 
Table-Talk, how deeply he was impressed, as a boy, by his father's 
putting on a mourning suit, when he heard of the first shedding 
of American blood. 

Nor could it, in the nature of things, have been only their 
warm and undoubted attachment to England, which made so 
many of the men of 177G reluctant to the last to cross the Rubicon. 
They saw clearly before them, they could not help seeing, the 
full proportions, the tremendous odds, of the contest into which 
the Colonies must be plunged by such a step. Think you that 
no apprehensions and anxieties weighed heavily on the minds 
and hearts of those far-seeing men ? Think you that as their 
names were called on the day we commemoi'ate, beginning with 
Josiah Bartlett, of New Hampshire, — or as, one by one, they 
approached the Secretary's desk on the following 2d of August, 
to write their names on that now hallowed parchment,— they 
did not realize the full responsibility, and the full risk to their 
country and to themselves, which such a vote and such a signa- 



ORATION ROBERT 0. WINTHROP. 171 

tare iuvolved ? They sat, indeed, with closed doors ; and it is 
only from traditions or eaves-droppings, or from the casual 
expressions of diaries or letters, that we catch glimpses of what 
was done, or gleanings of what was said. But how full of 
import are some of those glimpses and gleanings ! 

"Will you sign?" said Hancock to Charles Carroll, who, as 
we have seen, had not been present on the 4th of July. " Most 
willingly," was the reply. "There goes two millions with a 
clash of the pen," says one of those standing by ; while another 
remarks, "Oh, Carroll, you will get off, there are so many 
Charles Carrolls." And then we may see him stepping back to 
the desk, ami putting that addition — "of Carrollton'' — to his 
name, which will designate him for ever, and be a prouder title 
of nobility than those in the peerage of Great Britain which 
were afterwards adorned by his accomplished and fascinating 
<jT;ind-dau£hters. 

" We must stand by each' other — we must hang together," 

is presently heard from some one of the signers ; with the in- 
stant reply, "Yes, we must hang together, or we shall assuredly 
hang separately." And, on this suggestion, the portly and 
hnmorous Benj. Harrison, whom we have seen forcing Hancock 
into the Chair, may be heard bantering our spare and slender 
Elbridge Gerry, — levity provoking levity, — and telling him with 
grim merriment that, when that hanging scene arrives, he shall 
have the advantage : " It will be all over with me in a mo- 
ment, but you will be kicking in the air half an hour after I 
am gone !" These are among the " asides " of the drama, but, 
I need not say, they more than make up in significance for all 
they may seem to lack in dignity. 

The excellent William Ellery, of Bhode Island, whose name 
was afterwards borne by his grandson, our revered Channin"-, 
often spoke, we are told, of the scene of the signing, and spoke of 
it as an event which many regarded with awe, perhaps with uncer- 
tainty, but none with fear. " I was determined," he used to say, 
" to see how all looked, as they signed what might be their death 
warrant. I placed myself beside thp Secretary, Charles Thomson, 
and eyed each closely as he affixed his name to the document. 
Undaunted resolution was displayed in every countenance." 



172 OUR KATIONAX JUBILEE. 

"You inquire," wrote John Adams to William Plumer, 
" whether every member of Congress did, on the 4th of July, 
1776, in fact, cordially approve of the Declaration of Independ- 
ence, They who were then members all signed it, and, as I 
could not see their hearts, it would be hard for me to say that 
they did not approve it ; but, as far as I could penetrate the 
intricate internal foldings of their souls, I then believed, and 
have not since altered my opinion, that there were several who 
signed with regret, and several others with many doubts and 
much lukewarmness. The measure had been on the carpet for 
months, and obstinately opposed from day to day. Majorities 
were constantly against it. For many days the majority de- 
pended mpon Mr. Hewes, of North Carolina. While a member 
one day was speaking and reading documents from all the Col- 
onies to prove that the public opinion, the general sense of all, 
was in favor of the measure, when he came to North Carolina, 
and produced letters and public proceedings which demonstrated 
that the majority of that Colony were in favor of it, Mr. Hewes, 
who had hitherto constantly voted against it, started suddenly 
upright, and lifting up both his hands to Heaven, as if he had 
been in a trance, cried out, 'It is done, and I will abide by it.' 
I would give more for a perfect painting of the terror and hor- 
ror upon the faces of the old majority, at that critical moment, 
than for the best piece of Raphael." 

There is quite enough in these traditions and hearsays, in 
these glimpses and gleanings, to show us that the supporters 
and signers of the Declaration were not blind to the respon- 
sibilities and hazards in which they were involving themselves 
and the country. There is quite enough, certainly, in these 
and other indications, to give color and credit to what I so well 
remember hearing the late Mr. Justice Story say, half a century 
ago, that, as the result of all his conversations with the great 
men of the Revolutionary Period, — and especially with his 
illustrious and venerated chief on the bench of the Supreme 
Court of the United States, John Marshall, — he was convinced 
that a majority of the Continental Congress was opposed to the 
Declaration, and that it was carried through by the patient, per- 
sistent, and overwhelming efforts and arguments of the minority. 



ORATION ROBERT C. WINTHROP. 173 

Two of these arguments, as Mr. Jefferson has left them on 
record, were enough for that occasion, or certainly are enough 
for this. 

One of the two was, " That the people wait for us to lead 
the way ; that they are in favor of the measure, though the 
instructions given by some of their representative s are not." 
And most true, indeed, it was, my friends, at that day, as it 
often has been since that day, that the people were ahead of 
their so-called leaders. The minds of the masses were made up. 
They had no doubts or misgivings. They demanded that In- 
dependence should be recognized and proclaimed. John 
Adams knew how to keep up with them. Sam. Adams had 
kept his finger on their pulse from the beginning, and had 
" marked time " for every one of their advancing steps. Pat- 
rick Henry and Richard Henry Lee and Thomas Jefferson, and 
some other ardent and noble spirits, were by no means behind 
them. But not a few of the leaders were, in fact, only followers. 
" The people waited for them to lead the way." Independence 
was the resolve and the act of the American people, and the 
American people gladly received, and enthusiastically ratified, 
and heroically sustained the Declaration, until Independence 
was no longer a question either at home or abroad. Yes, our 
Great Charter, as we fondly call it, though with something, it 
must be confessed, of poetic or patriotic license, was no tempor- 
izing concession, wrung by menaces from reluctant Monarchs; 
but was the spontaneous and imperative dictate of a Nation 
resolved to be free! 

The other of those two arguments was even more conclusive 
and more clinching. It was, " That the question was not 
whether by a Declaration of Independence we should make 
ourselves what we are not, but whether we should declare a fact 
which already exists." 

" A fact which already exists ! '' Mr. Mayor and Fellow 
Citizens, there is no more interesting historical truth to us of 
Boston than this. Our hearts are all at Philadelphia to-day, 
as I have already said, rejoicing in all that is there said and done 
in honor of the men who made this day immortal, and hailing it, 
with our fellow-countrymen, from ocean to ocean, and from the 



174 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

lakes to the gulf, as our National Birthday. Arid nobly has 
Philadelphia met the requisitions, and more than fulfilled, the 
expectations of the occasion ; furnishing a fete and a pageant of 
which the whole nation is proud. Yet we are not called on to 
forget, — we could not be pardoned, indeed, for not remem- 
bering, — that, while the Declaration was boldly and grandly 
made in that hallowed Pennsylvania Hall, Independence had 
already been won, — and won here in Massachusetts. It was 
said by some one of the old patriots, — John Adams, I believe, 
— tjiat " The Revolution was effected before the war com- 
menced ; " and Jefferson is now our authority for the assertion 
that " Independence existed before it was declared." They 
both well knew what they were talking about. Congresses in 
Carpenters' Hall, and Congresses in the old Pennsylvania 
State House, did grand things and were composed of grand 
men, and we render to their memories all the homage and all 
the glory which they so richly earned- But here in Boston, the 
capital of Massachusetts, and the principal town of British 
North America at that day, the question had already been 
brought to an issue, and already been irrevocably decided. 
Here the manifest destiny of the Colonies had been recognized 
and accepted. It was upon us, as all the world knows, that the 
blows of British oppression fell first and fell heaviest, — fell like 
a storm of hail-stones and coals of fire ; and where they fell, 
and as soon as they fell, they were resisted, and successfully re- 
sisted. 

Why, away back in 1761, when George the Third had been 
but a year on his throne, and when the printer's ink on the 
pages of our Harvard " Pietas et Gratulatio " was hardly dry • 
when the Seven Years' War was still unfinished, in which New 
England had done her full share of the fighting, and reaped 
her full share of the glory, and when the British flag, by the 
help of her men and money, was just floating in triumph over 
the whole American .Continent, — a mad resolution had been 
adopted to reconstruct — Oh, word of ill-omen! — the whole Co- 
lonial system, and to bring America into closer conformity and 
subjection to the laws of the Mother Country. A Revenue is to 
be collected here. A Standing Army is to be established here. 



ORATION — ROBERT C. WINTHROP. 175 

The Navigation Act and Acts of Trade are to be enforced and 
executed here. And all without any representation on our 
part. — The first practical step in this direction is taken. A 
custom-house officer, named Cockle, applies to the Superior 
Court at Salem for a writ of assistance. That cockle-shell ex- 
ploded like dynamite ! The Court postpones the case, and or- 
ders its argument in Boston. And then and there, — in 1761, in 
our Old Town House, afterwards known as the Old State House, 
— alas, alas, that it is thought necessary to talk about removing 
or even reconstructing it ! — James Otis, as John Adams himself 
tells us, " breathed into this nation the breath of life." " Then 
and there," he adds, and he spoke of what he witnessed and 
heard, " then and there the child Independence was born. In 
fifteen years, i. e., in 1776 he grew up to manhood, and declared 
himself free." 

The next year finds the same great scholar and orator ex- 
posing himself to the cry of " treason " in denouncing the idea 
of taxation without representation, and forthwith vindicating 
himself in a masterly pamphlet which excited the admiration 
and sympathy of the whole people. 

Another year brings the first installment of the scheme for 
raising a revenue in the Colonies, — in the shape of declaratory 
resolves ; and Otis meets it plumply and boldly, in Faneuil Hall, 
—at that moment freshly rebuilt and reopened, — with the 
counter declaration that " every British subject in America, is, 
of common right, by act of Parliament, and by the laws of God 
and Nature, entitled to all the essential privileges of Britons." 

And now George- Grenville has devised and proposed the 
Stamp act. And, before it is even known that the Bill had 
passed, Samuel Adams is heard reading, in that same Faneuil 
Hall, at the May meeting of 1764, those memorable instructions 
from Boston to her representatives : " There is no room for 
delay. If taxes are laid upon us in any shape without our 
having a legal representation where they are laid, are we not 
reduced from the character of free subjects to the miserable 
state of tributary slaves ? . . . We claim British rights, not 
by charter only ; we are born to them. Use your endeavors 
that the weight of the other North American Colonies may be 



176 OUR NATIONAL JUBELBE. 

added to that of this Province, that by united application all 
may happily obtain redress." Redress and Union — and union 
as the means, and the only means of redress — had thus early 
become the doctrine of our Boston leaders ; and James Otis 
follows out that doctrine, without a moment's delay, in another 
brilliant plea for the rights of the Colonies. 

The next year finds the pen of John Adams in motion, in a 
powerful communication to the public journals, setting forth 
distinctly that " there seems to be a direct and formal design 
on foot in Great Britain to enslave all America ; " and adding 
most ominously those emphatic words : " Be it remembered, 
Liberty must be defended at all hazards ! " 

And, I need not say, it was remembered ; and Liberty was 
defended, at all hazards, here upon our own soil. 

Ten long years, however, are still to elapse before the wager 
of battle is to be fully joined. The stirring events which 
crowded those years, and which have been so vividly depicted 
by Sparks and Bancroft and Frothingham, — to name no 
others, — are too familiar for repetition or reference. Virginia, 
through the clarion voice of Patrick Henry, nobly sustained by 
her House of Burgesses, leads off in the grand remonstrance. 
Massachusetts, through the trumpet tones of James Otis, rouses 
the whole Continent by a demand for a General Congress. 
South Carolina, through the influence of Christopher Gadsden, 
responds first to the demand. " Deep calleth unto deep." In 
October, 1765, delegates, regularly or irregularly chosen, from 
nine Colonies, are in consultation in New York ; and from 
South Carolina comes the watchword of assured success : 
" There ought to be no New England man, no New Yorker, 
known on the Continent ; but all of us Americans." 

Meantime, the people are everywhere inflamed and maddened 
by the attempt to enforce the Stamp Act. Everywhere that 
attempt is resisted. Everywhere it is resolved that it shall 
never be executed. It is at length repealed, and a momentary 
lull succeeds. But the repeal is accompanied by more declara- 
tory resolutions of the power of Parliament to tax the Colonies 
"in all cases whatsoever;" and then follows that train of 
abuses and usurpations which Jefferson's immortal paper 



ORATION — ROBERT C. WTNTHROP. 177 

charges upon the King, and which the King himself unquestion- 
ably ordered. " It was to no purposes,'' said Lord North, in 
1774, " making objections, for the King would have it so." 
" The King," said he, " meant to try the question with America.'' 
And it is well added by the narrator of the anecdote, " Boston 
seems to have been the place fixed upon to try the question." 

Yes, at Boston, the bolts of Royal indignation are to be aimed 
and winged. She has been foremost in destroying the Stamps, 
in defying the Soldiers, in drowning the Tea. Letters, too, 
have reached the government, like those which Rehum the 
Chancellor and Shimshai the Scribe wrote to King Artaxerxes 
about Jerusalem, calling this " a rebellious city, and hurtful 
unto Kings and Provinces, and that they have moved sedition 
within the same of old time, and would not pay toll, tribute, 
and custom ; " and warning His Majesty that, unless it was 
subdued and crushed, " he would have no portion on this side 
of the River." In vain did our eloquent young Quincy pour 
forth bis burning words of remonstrance. The Port of Boston 
is closed, and her people are to be starved into compliance. 
Well did Boston say of herself, in Town Meeting, that " She 
had been stationed by Providence in the front rank of the con- 
flict." Grandly has our eloquent historian, Bancroft, said of 
her, in a sentence which sums up the whole matter " like the 
last embattling of a Roman legion:'' — "The King set himself 
and his Ministry and his Parliament and all Great Britain to 
subdue to his will one stubborn little town on the sterile coast of 
the Massachusetts Bay. The odds against it were fearful ; but it 
showed a life inextinguishable, and had been chosen to keep 
guard over the liberties of mankind ! " 

Generously and nobly did the other Colonies come to our 
aid, and the cause of Boston was everywhere acknowleged to 
be "the cause of all." But we may not forget how peculiarly 
it was " the cause of Boston," and that here on our own Massa- 
chusetts soil, the practical question of Independence was first 
tried and virtually settled. The brave Colonel Pickering at 
Salem Bridge, the heroic minute men at Lexington and Con- 
cord Bridge, the gallant Colonel Prescott at Bunker Hill, did 
their part in hastening that settlement and bringing it to a crisis; 



178 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

and when the Continental Army was at length brought to our 
rescue, and the glorious Washington, after holding the British 
forces at bay for nine months, had fairly driven them from the 
town, — though more than three months were still to intervene 
before the Declaration was to be made, — It could truly and 
justly be said that it was only "the declaration of a fact which 
already exists." 

Indeed, Massachusetts had practically administered " a 
government independent of the King" from the 19th of July, 
1775 ; while on the very first day of May, 1776, her General 
Court had passed a solemn Act, to erase forthwith the name of 
the King, and the year of his reign, from all civil commissions, 
writs, and precepts ; and to substitute therefor " the Tear of the 
Christian Era, and the name of the Government and the people 
of the Massachusetts Bay in New England." Other Colonies 
may have empowered or instructed their delegates in Congress, 
earlier than this Colony, to act on the subject. But this was 
action itself, — positive, decisive, conclusive action. The Declar- 
ation was made in Philadelphia ; but the Independence which 
was declared can date back nowhere, for its first existence as a 
fact, earlier than to Massachusetts. Upon Jier the lot fell " to try 
the question ; " and, with the aid of Washington and the Conti- 
nental Army, it was tried, and tried triumphantly upon her soil. 
Certainly, if Faneuil Hall was the Cradle of Liberty, our Old 
State House was the Cradle of Independence, and our Old South 
the Nursery of Liberty and Independence both ; and if these 
sacred edifices, all or any of them, are indeed destined to dis- 
appear, let us see to it that some corner of their sites, at least, 
be consecrated to monuments which shall tell their story, in 
legible lettering, to our children and our children's children for 
ever ! 

Thanks be to God, that, in His good providence, the trial of 
this great question fell primarily upon a Colony and a people pe- 
culiarly fitted to meet it ; — whose whole condition and training 
had prepared them for it, and whose whole history had pointed 
to it. 

Why, quaint old John Evelyn, in his delicious Diaiy, tells us, 
under date of May 1G71, that the great anxiety of the Council 



ORATION ROBERT C. WTNTHROP. 179 

for Plantations, of which he had just been made a member, was 
"to know the condition of New England," which appeared " to 
be very independent as to their regard to Old England or His 
Majesty," and " almost upon the very brink of renouncing any 
dependence on the Crown ! " 

" I have always laughed," said John Adams, in a letter to 
Benjamin Rush, in 1807, " at the affectation of representing 
American Independence as a novel idea, as a modern discovery, 
as a late invention. The idea of it as a possible thing, as a pro- 
bable event, as a necessary and unavoidable measure, in case 
Great Britain should assume an unconstitutional authority over 
.us, has been familiar to Americans from the first settlement of 
the country, and was as well understood by Governor Winthrop 
in 1675, as by Governor Samuel Adams, when he told you that 
Independence had been the first wish of his heart for seven 
years." " The principles and feelings which produced the Re- 
volution," said he again, in his second letter to Tudor, in 1818, 
"ought to be traced back for two hundred years, and sought 
in the history of the country from the first plantations in 
America." The first emigrants, he maintains, were the true 
authors of our Independence, and the men of the Revolutionary 
period, himself among them, were only, " the awakeners and 
revivers of the original fundamental principle of Colonization." 

And the accomplished historian of New England, Dr. Pal- 
frey, follows up the idea, and says more precisely: "He who 
well weighs the facts which have been presented in connection 
with the principal emigration to Massachusetts, and other 
related facts which will offer themselves to notice as we proceed, 
may find himself conducted to the conclusion that when Win- 
throp and his associates (in 1629) prepared to convey across 
the water a charter from the King, which, they hoped, would 
in their beginnings afford them some protection both from 
himself, and through him, from the Powers of Continental 
Europe, they had conceived a project no less important than 
that of laying on this side of the Atlantic the foundations of a 
Nation of Puritan Englishmen, — foundations to be built upon 
as future circumstances should decide or allow." 

Indeed, that transfer of their Charter and of their " whole 



180 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

government " to New England, on their own responsibility, was 
an act closely approaching to a Declaration of Independence, 
and clearly foreshadowing it. And when, only a few years 
afterwards, we find the magistrates and deputies resisting a 
demand for the surrender of the Charter, studiously and sys- 
tematically " avoiding and protracting " all questions on the 
subject, and " hastening their fortifications " meantime ; and 
when we hear even the ministers of the Colony openly declaring 
that, "if a General Governor were sent over here, we ought not 
to accept him, but to defend our lawful possessons, if we were 
able,'' — we recognize a spirit and a purpose which cannot be 
mistaken That spirit and that purpose were manifested and- 
illustrated in a manner even more marked and unequivocal, — as 
the late venerable Josiah Quincy reminded the people of Boston, 
just a half a century ago to-day, — when under the lead of one 
who had come over in the ship with the Charter, and had lived 
to be the Nestor of New England, — Simon Bradstreet,— " a 
glorious Revolution was effected here in Massachusetts thirty 
days before it was known that King William had just effected 
a similar glorious Revolution on the other side of the Atlantic." 
New England, it seems, with characteristic and commendable 
despatch, had fairly got rid of Sir Edmund Andros, a month 
before she knew that Old England had got rid of his Master! 
But I do not forget that we must look further back than even 
the earliest settlement of the American Colonies for the primal 
Eiat of Independence. I do not forget that when Edmund 
Burke, in 1775, in alluding to the possioility of an American 
representation in Parliament, exclaimed so emphatically and el- 
oquently, " Opposuit Natura — I cannot remove the eternal bar- 
riers of the creation," he had really exhausted the whole argu- 
ment. No effective representation was possible. If it had been 
possible, England herself would have been aghast at it. The 
very idea of James Otis and Patrick Henry and the Adamses 
arguing the great questions of human rights and popular liberty 
on the floor of the House of Commons, and in the hearing of the 
common people of Great Britain, would have thrown the King 
and Lord North into convulsions of terror, and we should soon 
have heard them crying out " These men that have turned the 



ORATION ROBERT C. WINTHROP. 181 

world upside down are come hither also." Oue of their own 
Board of Trade (Soame Jenyns) well said, with as much truth as 
humor or sarcasm, "I have lately seen so many specimens of the 
great powers of speech of which these American gentlemen are 
possessed, that I should be afraid the sudden importation of so 
much eloquence at once would endanger the safety of England, 
It will be much cheaper for us to pay their Army than their Or- 
ators." But no effective representation was possible ; and with- 
out it Taxation was Tyranny, in spite of the great Dictionary 
dogmatist and his insolent pamphlet. 

Why, even in these days of Ocean Steamers, reducing the 
passage across the Atlantic from forty or fifty or sixty days to 
ten, representation in Westminster Hall is not proposed for the 
colonies which England still holds on our continent; and it 
would be little better than a farce, if it were proposed and at- 
tempted. The Dominion of Canada, as we all know, remains as 
she is, seeking neither independence nor annexation, only be- 
cause her people prefer to be, and are proud of being, a part of 
the British empire ; and because that empire has abandoned all 
military occupation or forcible restraint upon them, and has 
adopted a system involving no collision or contention. Canada 
is now doubly a monument of the greatness and wisdom of the 
immortal Chatham. His military policy conquered it for Eng- 
land ; and his civil policy, "ruling from his urn," and supple- 
mented by that of his great son, holds it for England at this 
day ; permitting it substantially to rule itself, through the 
agency of a Parliament of its own, with at this moment, as it 
happens, an able, intelligent, and accomplished Governor-Gen- 
eral, whose name and blood were not without close affinities to 
those of that marvelouss tatesman and orator while he lived. 

It did not require the warning of our example to bring about 
such results. It is written in the eternal constitution of things 
that no large colonies, educated to a sense of their rights and 
capable of defending them, — no English or Anglo-Saxon colonies, 
certainly, — can be governed by a power three thousand miles 
across an ocean, unless they are governed to their own satisfac- 
tion, and held as colonies with their own consent and free will. 
An Imperial military sway may be as elastic and far-reaching as 



182 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

the magnetic wires, — it matters not whether three thousand or 
fifteen thousand miles, — over an uncivilized region or an unen- 
lightened race. But who is wild enough to conceive, as Burke 
said a hundred yc ars ago, " that the natives of Hindostan and 
those of Virginia could be ordered in the same manner ; or 
that the Cutchery Court and the grand jury at Salem could he 
regulated on a similar plan ? " "I am convinced," said Fox, 
in 1791, in the fresh light of the experience America had afforded 
him, " that the only method of retaining distant Colonies with 
advantage is to enable them to govern themselves." 

Yes, from the hour when Columbus and his compeers discov- 
ered our continent, its ultimate political destiny was fixed. At 
the very gateway of the Pautheon of American Liberty and 
American Independence might well be seen a triple monument, 
like that to the old inventors of printing at Frankfort, including 
Columbus and Americus Vespueius and Cabot. They were the 
pioneers in the march to Independence. They were the pre- 
cursors in the only progress of freedom which was to have no 
backward steps. Liberty had struggled long and bravely in 
other ages and in other lands. It had made glorious manifes- 
tations of its power and promise in Athens and in Rome ; in 
the mediaeval republics of Italy ; on the plains of Germany ; 
along the dykes of Holland ; among the icy fastnesses of Swit- 
zerland ; and, more securely and hopefully still, in the sea-girt 
isle of Old England. But it was the glory of those heroic old 
navigators to reveal a standing-place for it at last, where its 
lever could find a secure fulcrum, and rest safely until it had 
moved the world ! The fullness of time had now come. Under 
an impulse of religious conviction, the poor, persecuted Pil- 
grims launched out upon the stormy deep in a single, leaking, 
almost foundering bark ; and in the very cabin of the " May- 
flower" the first written compact of self government in the history 
of mankind is prepared and signed. Ten years afterwards 
the Massachusetts Company come over with their Charter, 
and administer it on the avowed princple that the whole gov- 
ernment, civil and religious, is transferred. All the rest which 
is to follow until the 4th of July, 177G, is only matter of 
time and opportunity. Certainly, my friends, as we look 



ORATION ROBERT C. WINTHROP. 183 

back to-day through the long vista of the past, we perceive 
that it was no mere Declaration of men, which primarily 
brought about the Independence we celebrate. We cannot 
but reverently recognize the hand of that Almighty Maker of 
the "World, who "founded it upon the seas and established it 
upon the Hoods," We cannot but feel the fidl force and feli- 
city of those opening words, in which the Declaration speaks of 
our assuming among the powers of the earth, " that separate 
and equal station to which the laws of Nature and of Nature's 
God entitle us.'' 

I spoke, Mr. Mayor, at the outset of this oration, of " A Cen- 
tury of Self-Government Completed." And so, in some sort, it 
is. The Declaration at Philadelphia was, in itself, both an as- 
sertion and an act of self-government ; and it had been preceded, 
or was immediately followed, by provisions for local self-govern- 
ment in all the separate Colonies ; — Massachusetts, New Hamp- 
shire, and South Carolina, conditionally, at least, having led the 
way. But we may not forget that six or seven years of hard 
fighting are still to intervene before our Independence is to be 
acknowledged by Great Britain ; and six or seven years more 
before the full consummation will have been reached by the 
adoption of the Federal Constitution, and the organization 
of our National System under the august and transcendent 
Presidency of Washington. 

With that august and transcendent Presidency, dating, — as 
it is pleasant to remember, — precisely a hundred years from the 
analogous accession of William of Orange to the throne of Eng- 
land, our history as an organized Nation fairly begins. When 
that Centennial Anniversary shall arrive, thirteen years hence, 
the time may have come for a full review of our National career 
and character, and for a complete computation or a just esti- 
mate of what a Century of Self-Government has accomplished 
for ourselves and for mankind. 

I dared not attempt such a review to-day. This anniversary 
has seemed to me to belong peculiarly, — I had almost said, 
sacredly, — to the men and the events which rendered the Fourth 
of July so memorable for ever ; and I have willingly left myself 
little time for anything else. God grant, that, when the 30th of 



184 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

April, 1889, shall dawn upon those of us who may liveHo see it, 
the thick clouds which now darken our political sky may have 
passed away; that wholesome and healing councils may have pro- 
vailed throughout our land ; that integrity and purity may be 
once more conspicuous in our high pi ices ; that an honest cur- 
rency may have been re-established, and prosperity restored to 
all branches of our domestic industry and our foreign commerce; 
and that some of those social problems which are perplexing 
and tormenting so many of our Southern States may have been 
safely and satisfactorily solved ! 

For, indeed, Fellow Citizens, we cannot shut our eyes to the 
fact, that this great year of our Lord and of American Liberty 
has been ushered in by not a few discouraging and depressing 
circumstances. Appalling catastrophes, appalling crimes, have 
marked its course. Financial, political, moral, delinquencies 
and wrongs have swept over our land like an Arctic or an Ant- 
arctic wave, or both conjoined ; until we have been almost 
ready to cry out in anguish to Heaven, " Thou hast multi- 
plied the nation, but not increased the joy!" It will be an 
added stigma, in all time to come, on the corruption of the hour 
and on all concerned in it, that it has cast so deep a shade over 
our Centennial Festival. 

All this, however, we are persuaded, is temporary and excep- 
tional, — the result, not of our institutions but of disturbing 
causes ; and as distinctly traceable to those causes as the scoriae 
of a volcano, or the debris of a deluge. Had there beeu no 
long and demoralizing Civil War to account for such develop- 
ments, we might indeed be alarmed for our future. As it is, 
our contidence in the Republic is unshaken. We are ready even 
to accept all that has occured to overshadow our jubilee, as a 
seasonable warning against vain-glorious boastings ; as a timely 
admonition that our institutions are not proof against licen- 
tiousness and profligacy, but that " eternal vigilance is still the 
price of liberty." 

Already the reaction has commenced. Already the people 
are everywhere roused to the importance of something higher 
than mere partisan activity and zeal, and to a sense that some- 
thing besides "big wars'' may be required to " make ambition 



OEATION — ROBERT C. WINTHROP. 185 

virtue." Everywhere the idea is scouted that there are any 
immunities or impunities for bribery and corruption ; and the 
scorn of the whole people is deservedly cast on any one detected 
in plucking our Eagle's wings to feather his own nest. Every- 
where there is a demand for integrity, for principle, for char- 
acter, as the only safe qualifications for public employments, as 
well as for private trusts. Oh, let that demand be enforced and 
insisted on, — as I hope and believe it will be, — and we shall 
have nothing to fear for our freedom, and but little to regret in 
the temporary depression and mortification which have recalled 
us to a deeper sense of our dangers and our duties. 

Meantime, we may be more than content that no short-com- 
ings or failures of our own day can diminish the glories of the 
past, or dim the brilliancy of successes achieved by our Fathers. 
We can look back upon our history so far, and find in it enough 
to make us grateful ; enough to make us hopeful ; enough to 
make us proud of our institutions and of our country : enough 
to make us resolve never to despair of the Republic ; enough to 
assure us that, could our Fathers look down on all which has 
been accomplished, they would feel that their toils and sacri- 
fices had not been in vain ; enough to convince other nations, 
and the world at large, that, in uniting so generously with us to 
decorate our grand Exposition, and celebrate our Centennial 
Birthday, they are swelling the triumphs of a People and a 
Power, which have left no doubtful impress upon the hundred 
years of their Independent National existence. 

Those hundred years have been crowded, as we all know, 
with wonderful changes in all quarters of the globe. I would 
not disparage or depreciate the interest and importance of the 
great events and great reforms which have been witnessed 
during their progress, and especially near their end, in almost 
every country of the Old World. Nor would I presume to 
claim too confidently for the closing Century, that when the 
records of mankind are made up, in some far-distant future, it 
will be remembered and designated, peculiarly and pre-eminent- 
ly, as The American Age. Yet it may be well doubted, whether 
the dispassionate historian of after years will find that the influ- 
ences of any other nation have been of farther reach and wider 



186 OTJB NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

range, or of more efficiency for the welfare of the world, than 
those of our Great Republic, since it had a name and a place on 
the earth. 

Other ages have had their designations, local or personal or 
mythical,— historic or pre-historic; — Ages of stone or iron, of 
silver or gold; Ages of Kings or Queens, of Reformers or of 
Conquerors. That marvelous compound of almost every thing 
wise or foolish, noble or base, witty or ridiculous, sublime or 
profane, — Voltaire, — maintained that, in his day, no man of 
reflection or of taste could count more than four authentic Ages 
in the history of the world : 1. That of Philip and Alexander, 
with Pericles and Demosthenes, Aristotle and Plato, Apelles, 
Phidias and Praxiteles: 2. That of Csesar and Augustus, with 
Lucretius and Cicero and Livy, Virgil and Horace, Varro and 
Vitruvius: 3. That of the Medici, with Michel Angelo and 
Raphael, Galileo and Dante: 4. That which he was at the 
moment engaged in dejncting, — the Age of Louis XD7., which, 
in his judgment, surpassed all the others ! 

Our American Age could bear no comparison with Ages like 
these,— measured only by the brilliancy of historians and philos- 
ophers, of poets or painters. We need not, indeed, be ashamed 
of what has been done for Literature and Science and Art, 
during these hundred years, nor hesitate to point with pride to 
our own authors and artists, living and dead. But the day has 
gone by when Literature and the Fine Arts, or even Science 
and the Useful Arts, can characterize an Age. There are other 
and higher measures of comparison. And the very nation 
which counis Voltaire among its greatest celebrities, — the nation 
which aided us so generously in our Revolutionary struggle, and 
which is now rejoicing in its own successful establishment of 
republican institutions, — the land of the great and good Lafay- 
ette, — has taken the lead in pointing out the true grounds on 
which our American Age may challenge and claim a special 
recognition. An association of Frenchmen, — under the lead of 
some of their most distinguished statesmen and scholars, — has 
proposed to erect, and is engaged in erecting, as their contribu- 
tion to our Centennial, a gigantic statue at the very throat of the 
harbor of our supreme commercial emporium, which shall sym- 



ORATION — ROBERT C. WINTHROP. 187 

bolize the legend inscribed on its pedestal, — " Liberty enlighten- 
ing the World ! " 

That glorious legend presents the standard by which our Age 
is to be judged; and by Avhich we may well be willing and 
proud to have it judged. All else in our own career, certainly, is 
secondary. The growth and grandeur of our territorial dimen- 
sions; the multiplication of our States; the number and size and 
wealth of our cities; the marvelous increase of our population; 
the measureless extent of our railways and internal navigation ; 
our overflowing granaries; our inexhaustable mines; our count- 
less inventions and multitudinous industries, — all these may be 
remitted to the Census, and left for the students of statistics. 
The claim which our country presents, for giving no second or 
subordinate character to the Age which has just closed, rests 
only on what has been accomplished, at home and abroad, for 
elevating the condition of mankind; for advancing political and 
human freedom; for promoting the greatest good of the great- 
est number; for proving the capacity of man for self-govern- 
ment; and for •' enlightening the world " by the example of a 
rational, regulated, enduring, Constitutional Liberty. And 
who will dispute or question that claim ? In what region of the 
eai'th ever so remote from us, in what corner of creation ever so 
far out of the range of our communication, does not some 
burden lightened, some bond loosened, some yoke lifted, some 
labor better remunerated, some new hope for despairing hearts, 
some new light or some new liberty for the benighted or the 
oppressed, bear witness this day and trace itself directly or in- 
directly back, to the impulse given to the world by the success- 
ful establishment and operation of Free Institutions on this 
American Continent ! 

How many Colonies have been more wisely and humanely 
and liberally administered, under the warning of our Kevolution ! 
How many Churches have abated something of their old intol- 
erance and bigotry, under the encouragement of our religious 
freedom ! Who believes or imagines that Free Schools, a Free 
Press, the Elective Franchise, the Flights of Eepresentation, the 
principles of Constitutional Government, would have made the 
notable progress they have made, had our example been want- 



188 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

ing! Who believes or imagines that even the Rotten Boroughs 
of Old England would have disappeared so rapidly, had there 
been no American Representative Republic! And has there 
been a more effective influence on human welfare and human 
freedom, since the world began, than that which has resulted 
from the existence of a great land of Liberty in this "Western 
Hemisphere, of unbounded resources, with acres enough for so 
many myriads of homes, and with a welcome for all who may fly 
t ) it from oppression, from every region beneath the sun ? 

Let not our example be perverted or dishonored, by others 
or by ourselves. It Avas no wild breaking away from all 
authority, which we celebrate to-day. It was no mad revolt 
aganist everything like government. No incendiary torch can 
be rightfully kindled at our flame. Doubtless, there had been 
excesses and violences in many quarters of our land, — irrepres- 
sible outbreaks under unbearable provocations, — "irregular 
things, done in the confusion of mighty troubles." Doubtless, 
our Boston mobs did not always move " to the Dorian mood of 
flutes and soft recorders." But in all our deliberative assem- 
blies, in all our Town Meetings, in all our Provincial and Con- 
tinental Congresses, there was a respect for the great principles 
of Law and Order; and the definition of true civil liberty, which 
had been so remarkably laid down by one of the founders of 
our Commonwealth, more than a century before, was, con- 
sciously or unconsciously, recognized, — " a Liberty for that only 
which is good, just, and honest." 

The Declaration we commemorate expressly admitted and 
asserted that " governments long established should not be 
changed for light and transient causes." It dictated no special 
forms of government for other people, and hardly for ourselves. 
It had no denunciation, or even disparagements, for monarchies 
or for empires, but eagerly comtemplated, as we do at this 
hour, alliances and frendly relations with both. We have wel- 
comed to our Jubilee, with peculiar interest and gratification, 
the representatives of the nations of Europe, — all them mon- 
archical,— to whom we were so deeply indebted for sympathy 
and for assistance in our struggle for Independence. We have 
welcomed, too, the personal presence of an Emperor, from an- 



ORATION ROBERT C. WINTHROP. 189 

other quarter of our hemisphere, of whose eager and enlight- 
ened interest in Education and Literature and Science we had 
learned so much from our lamented Agassiz, and have now wit- 
nessed so much for ourselves. 

Our Fathers were no propagandists of republican institutions 
in the abstract. Their own adoption of a republican form was, 
at the moment, almost as much a matter of chance as of choice, 
of necessity as of preference. The Thirteen Colonies had, hap- 
pily, been too long accustomed to manage then' own affairs, and 
were too wisely jealous of each other, also, to admit for an in- 
stant any idea of centralization ; and without centrahzation a 
monarchy, or any other form of arbitrary government, was out 
of the question. Union was then, as it is now, the 'only safety 
for liberty; but it could only be a constitutional Union, a limi- 
ted and restricted Union, founded on compromises and mutual 
concessions; a Union recognizing a large measure of State rights, 
— resting not only on the division of powers among legislative 
and executive departments, but resting also on the distribution 
of powers between the States and the Nation, both deriving 
their original authority from the people, and exercising that au- 
thority for the people. This was the system contemplated by 
the Declaration of 1776. This was the system approximated to 
by the Confederation of 1778-81. This was the system finally 
consummated by the Constitution of 1789. And under this 
system our great example of self-government has been held up 
before the nations, fulfilling, so far as it has fulfilled it, that lofty 
mission which is recognized to-day, as "Liberty enlightening 
the World ! " 

Let me not speak of that example in any vain-glorious spirit. 
Let me not seem to arrogate for my country any thing of su- 
perior wisdom or virtue. Who will pretend that we have 
always made the most of our independence, or the best 
of our liberty? Who will maintain that we have always 
exhibited the brightest side of our institutions, or always en- 
trusted their administration to the wisest or worthiest men ? 
Who will deny that we have sometimes taught the world what 
to avoid, as well as what to imitate; and that the cause of free- 
dom and reform has sometimes been discouraged and put back 



100 6tTR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

by our short-comings, or by our excesses ? Our light has been, 
at best, but a Revolving Light; warning by its darker intervals 
or its sombre shades as well as cheering by its flashes of bril- 
liancy or by the clear lustre of its steadier shining. Yet, in 
spite of all its imperfections and irregularities, to no other earthly 
light have so many eyes been turned; from no other earthly il- 
lumination have so many hearts drawn hope and courage. It 
has breasted the tides of sectional and of party strife. It has 
stood the shock of foreign and of civil war. It will still hold on, 
erect and unextinguished, defying " the returning wave " of de- 
moralization and corruption. Millions of young hearts, in all 
quarters of our land, are awaking at this moment to the respon- 
sibility which rests peculiarly upon them, for rendering its ra- 
diance purer and bright er and more constant. Millions of young 
hearts are resolving, at this hour, that it shall not be their fault 
if it do not stand for a century to come, as it has stood for a 
century past, a Beacon of Liberty to mankind; Their little 
na^s of hope and promise are floating to-day from every cottage 
window along the roadside. With those young hearts it is safe. 
Meantime, we may all rejoice and take courage, as we re- 
member of how great a drawback and obstruction our example 
has been disembarrassed and relieved within a few years past. 
Certainly , we cannot forget this day , in looking back over the cen- 
tury which is gone, how long that example was overshadowed , in 
the eyes of all men, by the existence of African Slavery in so con- 
siderable a portion of our country. Never, never, however, — it 
may be safely said, — was there a more tremendous, a more dread- 
ful jn-oblem submitted to a nation for solution than that which this 
institution involved for the United States of America. Nor were 
we alone responsible for its existence. I do not speak of it in the 
way of apology for ourselves. Still less would I refer to it in 
the way of crimination or reproach towards others, abroad or at 
home. But tbe well-known paragraph on this subject, in the 
original draught of the Declaration, is quite too notable a rem- 
iniscence of the little desk before me, to be forgotten on such an 
occasion as this. That omitted clause, — which, as Mr. Jefferson 
tells us " was struck out in complaisance to South Carolina and 
Georgia," not without " tenderness," too as he adds, to some 
"Northern brethern. who. though they had very few slaves 



OBATION — ROBERT C. WINTHROP. 191 

tliem selves, had been pretty considerable carriers of them to 
others," — contained the direct allegation that the King had 
" prostituted his negative for suppressing every legislative at- 
tempt to prohibit or restrain this execrable commerce." That 
memorable clause omitted for prudential reasons only, has 
passed into history, and its truth can never be disputed. It re- 
calls to us, and recalls to the world, the historical fact, — which 
we certainly have a special right to remember this day, — that 
not only had African Slavery found its portentous and perni- 
cious way into our Colonies in their very earliest settlement, but 
that it had been fixed and fastened upon some of them by Royal 
vetoes, prohibiting the passage of laws to restrain its further 
introduction. It had thus not only entwined and entangled it- 
self aboiit the very roots of our choicest harvests, — until Slavery 
and Cotton at last seemed as inseparable as tho t ires and wheat 
of the sacred parable, — but it had engrafted itself upon the very 
fabric of our government. We all know, the world knows, that 
our Independence could not have been achieved, our Union could 
not have been maintained, our Constitution could not have 
been established, without the adoption of those compromises 
which recognized its continued existence, and left it to the re- 
sponsibility of the States of which it was the grievous inherit- 
ance. And from that day forward, the method of dealing with 
it, of disposing of it, and of extinguishing it, became more and 
more a problem full of terrible perplexity, and seemingly inca- 
pable of human solution. 

Oh, that it could have been solved at last by some process 
less depl< >rable and dreadful than Civil War ! How unspeak- 
ably glorious it wovdd have been for us this day could the 
Great Emancipation have been concerted, arranged, and ulti- 
mately effected without violence or bloodshed, as a simple and 
sublime act of philanthropy and justice! 

But it was not in the Divine economy that so huge an origi- 
nal wrong should be righted by any easy process. The decree 
seemed to have gone forth from the very registries of Heaven : 

" Cuncta priue tentanda, sed immedicabile vulnus 
Ense reddendum est." 

The immedicable wound must be cut away by the sword ! 
Again and again, as that terrible war went on, we might almost 



li)2 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

hear voices crying out, in the words of the old prophet : " O, 
thou sword of the Lord, how long will it be ere thou be quiet ? 
Put up thyself into thy scabbard ; rest, and be still !" "But the 
answering voice seemed not less audible : " How can it be 
quiet, seeing the Lord hath given it a charge?" 

And the war went on,— bravely fought on both sides, as we 
all know, — until, as one of its necessities, Slavery was abolished. 
It fell at last under that right of war to abolish it, which the 
late John Quincy Adams had been the first to announce, in the 
way of warning, more than twenty years before, in my own 
hearing, on the floor of Congress, while I was your Representa- 
tive. I remember well the burst of indignation and derision 
with which that warning was received. No prediction of Cas^ 
sandra was ever more scorned than his, and he .did not live to 
witness its verification. But whoever else may have been more 
immediately and personally instrumental in the final result, — 
the brave soldiers who fought the battles, or the gallant gene- 
rals who led them, — the devoted philanthropists, or the ardent 
statesmen, who, in season and out of season, labored for it, — 
the Martyr-President who proclaimed it, — the true story of 
Emancipation can never be fairly and fully told without the 
"old man eloquent," who died beneath the roof of the Capitol 
nearly thirty years ago, being recognized as one of the leading 
figures of the narrative. 

But', thanks be to God, who overrules every thing for good, 
that great event", the greatest of our American Age, — great 
enough, alone and by itself, to give a name and a'character to any 
Age, — has been accomplished ; and, by His blessing, we present 
our country to the world tins day -without a slave, white or 
black, upon its soil ! Thanks be to God, not only that our be- 
loved Union has been saved, l3ut that it has been made both 
easier to save, and better worth saving, hereafter, by the final 
solution of a problem, before which all human wisdom had stood 
aghast and confounded for so many generations ! Thanks be to 
God, and to Him be all the praise and the glory, we can read 
the great words of the Declaration, on this Centemiial Anniver- 
sary, without reservation or evasion : " We hold these truths to 
be self-evident, that all men are created equal, and that they are 
endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable rights ; that 



ORATION — ROBERT C. WIXTKROP. 193 

among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness." 
The legend on that new colossal Pharos, at Long Island, may 
now indeed be, " Liberty enlightening the World I" 

VI. 

We come, then, to-day. Fellow Citizens, with hearts full of 
Duties of the gratitude to God and mar:, to pass down our country 

Future. a.nd its institutions, not wholly without scars and 
blemishes upon their front, — not without shadows on the past 
and clouds on the future, — but freed for ever from at least one 
great stain, and firmly rooted in the love and loyalty of a United 
People, — to the generations which are to succeed us. 

And what shall we say to those succeeding generations, as 
we commit the sacred trust to their keeping and guardianship ! 

If I could hope, without presumption, that any humble coun- 
sels of mine, on this hallowed Anniversary, could be remem- 
bered beyond the hour of their utterance, and reach the ears of 
my countrymen in future days ; if I could borrow " the masterly 
pen" of Jefferson, and produce words which should partake of 
the immortality of those which he wrote on this little desk ; if 
I could command the matchless tongue of John Adams, when 
he poured out appeals and arguments which moved men from 
their seats, and settled the destinies of a nation ; if I could 
catch but a single spark of those electric fires which Franklin 
wrested from the skies, and flash down a phrase, a word, a 
thought, along the magic chords which stretch across the ocean 
of the future, what could I, what would I, say ? 

I could not omit, certainly, to reiterate the solemn obligations 
which rest on every citizen of this Republic to cherish and en- 
force the great principles of our Colonial and Revolutionary 
Fathers, — the principles of Liberty and Law, one and inseparable 
— the principles of the Constitution and the Union. 

I could not omit to urge on every man to remember that self- 
government politically can only be successful, if it be accom- 
panied by self-government personally; that there must be 
government somewhere; and that, if the people are indeed to 
be sovereigns, they must exercise their sovereignty over them- 
selves individually, as well as over themselves in the aggregate, 
— regulating their own lives, resisting their own temptations, 



194 OtJR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

subduing their own passions, and voluntarily imposing upon them- 
selves some measure of that restraint and discipline, which, under 
other systems, is supplied from the armories of arbitrary power, — 
the disci] »line of virtue, in the place of the- discipline of slavery. 

I could not omit to caution them against the corrupting influ- 
ences of intemperance, extravagance and luxury. I could m>t 
omit to warn them against political intrigue, as well as against 
personal licentiousness; and to implore them to regard, principle 
and character, rather than mere party allegiance, in the choice of 
men to rule over them. 

I could not omit to call upon them to foster and further the 
cause of universal Education; to give a liberal support to our 
Schools and Colleges; to promote the advancement of Science 
and of Art, in all their multiplied divisions and relations; and 
to encourage and sustain all those noble institutions of Charity, 
which, in our own land above all others, have given the crown- 
ing grace and glory to modern civilization. 

I could not refrain from pressing upon them a just and 
generous consideration for the interests and the rights of their 
fellow-men every where, and an earnest effort to promote Peace 
and Good Will among the Nations of the earth. 

I could not refrain from reminding them of the shame, the 
unspeakable shame and ignominy, which would attach to those 
who should show themselves unable to uphold the glorious Fabric 
of Self -Government which had been founded for them at such a 
cost by their Fathers; — " Videte, videte, ne, ut Mis pvlcherrimum 
fuit iantam vobis imperii gloriam re/inquere, sic vobis turpissimum 
sit, illud quod accepistis, iueri et conservare non posse! " 

And surely, most surely, I could not fail to invoke them to 
imitate and emulate the examples of virtue and purity and 
patriotism, which the great founders of our Colonies and of our 
Nation had so abundantly left them. 

VII. 

But could I stop there ? Could I hold out to them, as the 

what are great results of a long life of observation and experience, 

men? nothing but the principles and examples of great men? 

Who and what are great men? " Woe to the country," said 
Metternich to our own Ticknor, forty years ago, " whose con- 



ORATION ROBERT 0. WINTHROP. 195 

dition and institutions no longer produce great men to manage 
its affairs." The wily Austrian applied bis remark to England at 
that day: but his woe — if it be a woe — would have a wider range 
in our time, and leave hardly any land unreached. Certainly we 
hear it now-a-days, at every turn, that never before has there been 
so striking a disproportion between supply and demand, as at 
this moment, the world over, in the commodity of great men. 

But who, and what, are great men? " And now stand forth," 
says an eminent Swiss historian, who had completed a survey 
of the whole history of mankind, at the very moment when, as 
he says, "a blaze of freedom is just bursting forth beyond the 
ocean," — " And now stand forth, ye gigantic forme, shades of 
the first Chieftains, and sons of Gods, wdio glimmer among 
the rocky halls and mountain fortresses of the ancient world; 
and you Conquerors of the world from Babylon and from 
Macedonia; ye Dynasties of Ctesars, of Huns, Arabs, Moguls 
and Tartars; ye Commanders of the Faithful on the Tigris, 
and Commanders of the Faithful on the Tiber; you hoary 
Counsellors of Kings, and Peers of Sovereigns; Warriors on the 
car of triumph, covered with scars, and crowned with laurels; ye 
long rows of Consuls and Dictators, famed for your lofty minds, 
your unshaken constancy, your ungovernable spirit; — stand 
forth, and let us survey for a while your- assembly, like a Council 
of the Gods ! What were ye ? The first among mortals ? Sel- 
dom can you claim that title ! The best of men? Still fewer of 
you have deserved such praise ! Were ye the Compellers, the in- 
stigators of the human race, the prime movers of aU their works ? 
Bather let us say that you were the instruments, that you were 
the wheels, by whose means the Invisible Being has conducted 
the incomprehensible fabric of universal government across the 
ocean of time ! " 

Instruments and wheels of the Invisible Governor of the Uni- 
verse! This is indeed all which the greatest of men ever 
have been or ever can be. No flatteries of courtiers; no adu- 
lations of the multitude; no audacity of self-reliance; no intox- 
ications of succes; no evolutions or developments of science, — 
can make more or other of them. This is " the sea-mark of 
their utmost sail," — the goal of their farthest run, — the very 
round and top of their highest soaring. 



196 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Oh, if there could be, to-day, a deeper and more pervading 
impression of this great truth throughout our land, and a more 
prevailing conformity of our thoughts and words and acts to 
the lessons which it involves, — if we could lift ourselves to a 
loftier sense of our relations to the Invisible, — if, in surveying 
our past history, we could catch larger and more exalted views 
of our destinies and our responsibilities, — if we could realize 
that the want of good men may be a heavier woe to a land than 
any want of what the world calls great men, — our Centennial 
Year would not only be signalized by splendid ceremonials and 
magnificent commemmorations and gorgeous expositions, but 
it would go far towards fulfilling something of the grandeur of 
that " Acceptable Year " which was announced by higher than 
human lips, and would be the auspicious promise and pledge of 
a glorious second century of Independence and Freedom for 
our country ! 

For, if that second century of self-government is to go on 
safely to its close, or is to go on safely and prosperously at all, 
there must be some renewal of that old spirit of subordination 
and obedience to Divine, as well as human, Laws, which has 
been our security in the past. There must be faith in some- 
thing higher and better than ourselves. There must be a rev- 
erent acknowledgment of an Unseen, but All-seeing, All-con- 
trolling, Ruler of the Universe. His Word, His Day, His House, 
His Worship, must be sacred to our children, as they have been 
to their fathers; and His blessing must never fail to be invoked 
upon our land and upon our liberties. The patriot voice, which 
cried from the balcony of yonder Old State House, when the 
Declaration had been originally proclaimed," Stability and Per- 
petuity to American Independence," did not fail to add, " God 
save our American States." I would prolong that ancestral 
prayer. And the last phrase to pass my lips at this hour, 
and to take its chance for remembrance or oblivion in years to 
come, as the conclusion of this Centennial Oration, and as the 
sum, and summing up, of all I can say to the present or the fu- 
ture, shall be: — There is, there can be, no Independence of God: 
In Him, as a Nation, no less than in Him, as individuals, " we 
live, and move, and have our being ! " God save our Ameri- 
can States! 



THE PROGRESS OF LIBERTY, 

AN ORATION BY HON. CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS. 

delivered at the centennial celebration in taunton, mass., july 

4th, 1876. 

I salute you, my fellow-countrymen, with a cheer of welcome 
on this joyous day, when forty millions of human voices rise up 
•with one accord to heaven, in grateful benisons for the mercies 
showered on three successive generations of the race, by the 
Great Disposer of events, during the hundred years that have 
passed away. Tec far be it from us to glory in this anniversary 
festival with any spirit of ostentation, as if assuming to be the 
very elect of Grod's creatures. Let us rather join in humble but 
earnest supplication for the continuance of that support froni 
aloft by reason of which a small and weak and scattered band 
have been permitted so to grow into strength as now to com- 
mand a recognized position among the leading powers of the 
earth. 

Less than three centuries since, the European explorer first set 
his foot on these northern shores, with a view to occupation. 
He found a primitive race aspiring scarcely higher than to the 
common enjoyment of animal existence, and slow to respond to 
any nobler call. How long they had continued in the same con- 
dition there was little evidence to determine. But enough has 
been since gathered to justify the belief that advance never could 
have been one of their attributes. Without forecast, and in- 
sensible to ambition, after long experience and earnest effort to 
elevate them, the experiment of civilization must be admitted to 
have failed. The North American Indian never could have im- 
proved the state he was in when first found here. He must be 
regarded merely as the symbol of continuous negation, of the 
everlasting rotation of the present, not profiting by the experi- 
ence of the past, and feebly sensible of the possibilities of the 
future. 



198 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

The European had at last come in upon him, and the scene 
began at once to change. The magnificence of nature presented 
to his view, to which the native had been blind, at once stimu- 
lated his passion to develop its advantages by culture, and ere 
long the wilderness began to blossom as the rose. The hum of 
industry was heard to echo in every valley, and it ascended 
every mountain. A new people had appeared, animated by a 
spirit which enlisted labor without stint and directed it in chan- 
nels of beauty and of use. With eyes steadily fixed upon the 
future, and their sturdy sinews braced to the immediate task, 
there is no cause for wonder that the sparse but earnest adven- 
turers who first set foot on the soil of the new continent, should 
in the steady progress of time, have made good the aspirations 
with which they began, of founding a future happy home for 
ever increasing millions of their race. Between two such forces, 
the American Indian, who dwells only in the present, and the 
European pioneer, who fixes his gaze so steadily on the future, 
the issue of a struggle could end only in one way. Whilst the 
one goes on dwindling even to the prospect of ultimate extinc- 
tion, the other spreads peace and happiness among numbers in- 
creasing over the continent with a rapidity never before equalled 
in the records of civilization. 

But here it seems as if I catch a sound of rebuke from afar in 
another quarter of the globe. " Come now," says the hoary 
denizen of ancient Africa, " this assurance on the part of a new 
people like you is altogether intolerable. You, of a race start- 
ing only as if yesterday, with your infant civilization, what non- 
sense to pride yourself on your petty labors, when you have not 
an idea of the magnitude of the works and the magnificence of 
the results obtained from them in our fertile regions by a popu- 
lation refined long and long and long before you and your 
boasted new continent were even dreamed of in the march of 
mankind. Just come over here to the land of Egypt, flowing 
with milk and honey. Cast a glance at our temples and pyra- 
mids, at our lakes and rivers, and even our tombs, erected so 
long since that nobody can tell when. Observe the masterly 
skill displayed in securing durability, calling for a correspond- 
in" - contribution of skilled labor # froin myriads of workmen to 



ORATION CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS. 199 

complete them. Consider further that even that holy book, 
which you yourselves esteem as embodying the highest concep- 
tion of the Deity, and lessons of morals continually taught 
among you to this day, had its origin substantially from here. 
Remember that all this happened before the development of 
the boasted Greek and Roman cultivation, and be modest with 
pretensions for your land of yesterday, of any peculiar merit for 
your aspirations to advance mankind. 

To all of which interjections of my African prompter I make 
but a short reply. By his own showing he appeals only to what 
was ages ago, and not to what now is. What are the imperish- 
able monuments constructed so long since, but memorials of an 
obsolete antiquity, to be gazed upon by the wandering traveler 
as examples never to be copied '? If once devoted to special 
forms of Divine worship, the faith that animated the structures 
has not simply lost its vitality, but has been buried in oblivion. 
What are the catacombs but futile efforts to perpetuate mere 
matter after the living principle has vanished away ? Why not 
have applied what they cost to advance the condition of the ris- 
ing generations ? How about the sacred book to which you 
refer ? Docs it not record an account of an emigration of an 
industrious and conscientious people compelled to ny by reason 
of the recklessness of an ignorant ruler ? And how has it been 
ever since ? Although conceded by nature one of the most 
favored regions of the earth, the general tendency has been far 
from indicating a corresponding degree of prosperity. Even 
the splendid memorials of long past ages testify by the solitude 
around them only to the folly of indulging in vain aspirations. 
The conclusion then to be drawn from such a spectacle is not a 
vision of life but of death, not of hope but of despair. 

Lo ! I have presented to you in this picture the three types 
of humanity as exemplified in the social systems of the world. 

Whilst the African represents the past, and the Indian clings 
only to the present, it is left to the European and his congener 
in America persistently to follow in the future the great object 
of the advancement of mankind. 

1. The retrogade. 2. The stationary. 3. The advance. 
Which is it to be with us ? 



200 ODE NATIONAL JUBLLEE. 

We can only judge of the future by what it lias been in the 
past. Is there or is there not a peculiar element, not found in 
cither of the other races, which has shown so much vigor in the 
American during the past century as to give him a fair right to 
count upon large inrprovement in time to come ? 

I confidently answer for him that there is. That element is 
his devotion to the principle of liberty. 

Do you ask me where to find it in words! Turn we then at 
once to the im?nortal scroll ever fastened into the solemnities of 
this our great anniversary. There lies imbedded in a brief sen- 
tence, more of living and pervading force than could have ever 
been applied to secure permanence to all the vast monuments of 
Egypt or the world. 

We all know it well, but still I repeat it: 

" We know these truths to be self-evident: 1. That all men 
are created equal. 2. That they are endowed by their Creator 
with inalienable rights. 3. That among them are life, liberty, 
and the pursuit of happiness." 

I have considered those significant words as vested with a 
virtue st) subtile as certain ultimately to penetrate the abodes of 
mankind all over the world. But I separate them altogether 
from the solemn charges against King George, which immedi- 
ately follow in the Declaration. These may have been just or 
they may not. In the. long interval of time which has passed, 
ample opportunity has been given to examine the allegations 
with more calmness than when they were just made. 

May I venture to express a modest doubt whether the Sov- 
ereign was in reality such a cruel tyrant as he is painted, and 
whether the ministers were so malignantly deaf to the appeals 
of colonial consanguinity as readers of this d-iy may be led, 
from the language used, to infer. The passage of a hundred 
years ought to inspire calmness in revising all judicial decis- 
ions in history. Let us, above all, be sure that we are right. 
May I be permitted to express an humble belief, that the grave 
errors of both sovereign, ministers and people, were not so 
mucli rooted in a spirit of willful and passionate tyranny, as of 
a supercilious indifference ; the same errors I might add, which 
have marked the policy of that nation in later times down to a 



ORATION — CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS. 201 

comparatively recent date. A very little show of sympathy, a 
ready ear to listen to alleged grievances, perhaps graceful con- 
cessions made in season, a disposition to look at colonists rather 
as brethren than as servants to sqaeeze something out of ; in 
short, fellowship and not haughtiness might have kept our 
affections as Englishmen perhaps down to this day. The true 
grievance was the treatment of the colonies as a burden instead 
of a blessing ; an object out of which to get as much and to 
which to give as little as possible. Least of all was there any 
conception of cultivating common affections and a common in- 
terest. The consequence of the mistake thus made was not only 
the gradual and steady alienation of the people, but to teach 
them habits of self-reliance. Then came at last the appeal to 
brute force — and all was over. Such seems to be the true cause 
of the breach, and not so much willful tyranny. And it appears 
in my opinion at least, quite as justifiable a cause for the sepa- 
ration, as any or all of the more vehement accusations so elabo- 
rately accumulated in the great Declaration of 1776. 

Passing from this digression, let me resume the consideration 
of the effect of the adoption of the great seminal principle which 
I have already pointed out as the pillar of fire illuminating the 
whole of our later path as an independent people. That this 
light has been no mere flashy, flickering, or uncertain guide, but 
steadily directing us toward the attainments of new and great 
results, beneficial not more immediately to ourselves than 
incidentally to the progress of the other nations of the world, 
it will be the object of this address to explain. 

Let us review the century. The motto shall be Excelsior. 

And first of all appears as a powerful influence of the new 
doctrine of freedom, though indirectly applied, the cooperation, 
with us in the struggle of the Sovereign Louis the Sixteenth, 
and the sympathy of the people of France. This topic would of 
itself suffice for an address, but I have so much more to say 
relative to ourselves as a directing power, that I must content 
myself with simply recalling to your minds what France was in 
1778, when governed by an absolute monarch cooperating with 
us in establishing our principle, but solely for the motive of de- 
pressing Great Britain, and what she is in this our centennial 



202 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

year, an independent republic ; after long and severe tribula- 
tion, at last deliberately ranging herself as a disciple of our 
school, frankly recognizing the force of our sovereign law. 

Our struggle for freedom had been some time over, when the 
arduous task of restoring order by the coSperation of the whole 
sense of the people in organizing an effective form of govern- 
ment, the first experiment of the kind in history, was crowned 
by the simultaneous selection by that people of a true hero who, 
having proved himself an eminent leader and trusty guide, 
through the perils of a seven years' conflict, was called to labor 
with even greater glory as a successful guide of liberty toward 
the arts of peace. 

Looking from this point of time in the year 1798, when an 
original experiment, the latest and most deliberate ever at- 
tempted, was on the verge of trial, it now becomes my duty to 
pass in review the chief results which have been secured by it 
to the human race during the past century. Has it succeeded 
or has it failed ? Above all, what has it done directly and in- 
directly in expanding the influence of its great doctrine of lib- 
erty, not merely at home, but over the wide surface of sea and 
land — nay, the great globe itself. 

Washington was President, but he had not had time to col- 
lect together his cabinet and distribute his work when events 
occurred which demanded instant attention. Without waiting 
for the advent of Jefferson, whom he had chosen as his aid in 
the Department of Foreign Affairs, he drew with his own hand 
certain papers of instructions which he committed to the charge 
of Mr. Grouverneur Morris, then about to sail for Great Britain, 
with directions promptly to confer with the British Minister 
thereon. Mr. Morris went out and accordingly communicated 
at once with the Foreign Secretary, the Duke of Leeds. The 
object was to negotiate a treaty of commerce, a very necessary 
measure at the time, but which was soon put aside by another 
and much more embarrassing difficulty. It had been immedi- 
ately reported to Mr. Morris that several persons claiming to 
be American citizens, when walking in the streets of London, 
suspecting no guile, had been, after the fashion of that day, 
pounced upon by a press gang and put on board of British 



ORATION CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS. 203 

vessels to serve as seamen, whether they would or no. 
Here was the beginning of a question of personal freedom, 
started out of the earth at once which no American agent could 
venture to trifle with. Although without special instructions, 
Mr. Morris did not hesitate a moment to submit the grievance 
to the consideration of the Minister. That dignitary contented 
himself with an evasive answer, and the plea of the difficulty of 
distinguishing between citizens speaking the same language; 
and such became the standing pretext for the seizure of Amer- 
icans for many years. The act itself, looked at in our present 
light, seems to have been brutal enough even when applied to 
subjects. How much more intolerable when invading the lib- 
erty of men having thrown off all allegiance to the crown. I 
doubt whether many of you will believe me when I tell you how 
many Americans underwent this kind of slavery. It appears 
from the official papers that in 1798, 051 persons were recorded 
as in this condition. Eight years later the return is increased 
to 2,273, and the year after it amounted to 4,229. The 
most flagrant act of all was the later seizure of several men on 
board of the Chesapeake, an American vessel of war, by a for- 
mal order of an Admiral of a British frigate on the coast. The 
ultimate consequence of the equivocating course of Great Bri- 
tain was that this grievance proved the chief cause of the war 
of 1812. 

If ever there was a question of liberty under the definition of 
1770, it seems to have been this, and the successive Presidents 
who were in office during the period, though themselves natives 
and citizens of a region little liable to suffer from the appre- 
hended evil, were not the less energetic and determined on that 
account in maintaining the right. 

On the other hand, this case is not without its lesson of tlie 
danger of infatuation in politics when we find that the resent- 
ment for these attacks upon liberty burned with far the most 
qualified ardor in the region where the population most fre- 
quented the seas. The singular spectacle then presented itself 
of the perseverance of those eminent statesmen in upholding, 
even at the cost of war, the rights of that portion of their breth- 
ren farthest removed from their own homesteads which Avere 



204 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

free from danger; while many inhabitants of the coast were 
absolutely exhausting all the vials of their wrath upon the same 
distinguished statesmen for laboring even at the cost of war to 
secure the safety on land and water, of persons actuaUy their 
nearest neighbors and friends. 

The result you all know, was the war, waged under the cry of 
" free trade and sailors rights." A severe trial, but abundantly 
rewarded, by the security gained for liberty. From the date 
of the peace with Great Britain down to the present hour no 
cause of complaint has occurred for the impressment of a single 
American citizen. No difficulty in distinguishing citizenship has 
been experienced even though little change has been made in 
the use of the language common to both nations. In short, no 
more men have been taken whether on land or on the ocean, by 
force, on any pretense whatever. 

Singularly enough, however, fifty years later, a question of 
parallel import suddenly sprang up which for the moment 
threatened to present the same nations in a position precisely 
reversed. A naval commander of a United States war vessel 
assumed the right to board a British passenger steamer crossing 
the sea on her way home, and to seize and carry off two Ameri- 
can citizens, just as British officers had done to us in former 
times. This proceeding was immediately resented, and the con- 
sequence was a new step in favor of liberty on the ocean, for 
the security of the civilized world. The great waters are now 
open to all nations, and the flag of any nation covers all who 
sail under it in times of peace, And Great Britain herself, too 
often in days long gone by, meriting the odious title of tyrant 
of the ocean, by assuming that principle in the instance spoken 
of, and likewise by resorting to other and better means than 
the horrors of the press gang, has not only raised the character 
of her own marine, but has pledged herself to follow in the very 
same path of humanity and civilization first marked out by our 
example. 

Such is the first instance of the direct effect upon human 
liberty of the law proclaimed a hundred years ago. I proceed 
to consider the second : 

In this year of our Lord 18 70, on looking back upon the 



ORATION -CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS. . 205 

early events cf the century, it seems almost impossible to be- 
lieve that human rights should have been then held in so much 
contempt on the high seas, and that by nations as despicable 
in character as weak in absolute force. 

As eaily as the year 1785, two American vessels following 
their course peaceably over the ocean were boarded by ships 
fitted out by the Algerines, then occupying an independent 
position on the Mediterranean coast. The vessels were plun- 
dered and the crew, numbering twenty-one American freemeD, 
takeu to Algiers and sold for slaves. 

Instead of protestation and remonstrance, and fitting out 
vessels of war to retort upon this insolent pirate, what did the 
government first do ? What but to pray the assistance and 
intervention of such a feeble power as Sweden to help us out of 
our distress, and money was to be offered, not merely to ran. 
snm the slaves, but to bribe the barbarian not to do so any 
more. Of course, he went to work more vigorously than ever, 
and his demands became more imperious and exacting. The 
patience of the great Powers of Europe, whom he treated with 
little more deference, only furnished one more example of the 
case with which more audacity may for a time secure advan- 
tages which will never be gained by fair dealing and good will. 
To an American of to-day, it is inexpressibly mortifying to re- 
view the legislation of the country on this matter at that time. 
It appears that so early as the year 1791. President Washing- 
ton, in the third year of his service, in his speech to Congress, 
first called the attention of that body to the subject. On the 
15th day of December the Senate referred the matter to a com- 
mittee, which in dne course of time reported a resolution to 
this effect : 

Resolved, That the Senate advise and consent that the Presi- 
dent take such measures as he may think necessary for the re- 
demption of the citizens of the United States now in captivity 
at Algiers, provided — (mind you) — provided the expense shall 
not exceed $10,000. 

Congress did not think of looking at the Declaration of In- 
dependence, but they passed the resolution. And what was 
the natural consequence ? The consular officer established by 



206 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

the United States in Algiers on learning the result approved it, 
but added this significant sentence : 

I take the liberty to observe that there is no doing any busi- 
ness of importance in this country without palming the min- 
istry. 

The logic of all this was, that the best way to keep our people 
free was to make it worth the while of this ministry to make 
them slaves. 

The natural consequence was that the cost of these operations 
ultimately exceeded $1,000 ; 000, and the example had set the 
kindred Barbary powers in an agony for a share of the plunder. 
In February, 1802, the gross amount of expenditure to pacify 
these pirates and man-stealers had risen to $2,500,000, a sum 
large enough, if properly expended on a naval force, to have 
cleared them out at a stroke. 

No wonder, then, that President Jefferson should presently 
begin to recur to his draft of the Declaration of Independence. 
Though never very friendly to the navy, he saw that freedom 
was at stake, hence in his annual message of 1803 he suggested 
fitting out a small force for the Mediterranean, in order to re- 
strain the Tripoiine cruisers, and added that the uncertain 
tenure of peace with several other of the Barbary powers might 
eventually require even a re-enforcement. 

So said Jefferson to Congress — but his words were not re- 
sponded to with promptness, and the evil went on increasing. 
The insolence of all the petty Barbary States only fattened by 
what it fed on, until the freedom of American seamen in the 
Mediterranean was measured only by the sums that could be 
paid for their ransom. There is no more ignominious part of 
our history than this. 

Driven at last to a conviction of the impolicy of such a course 
President Madison, having succeeded to the chair of state, on 
the 23d of February, sent a message to Congress recommending 
a declaration of war. The two Houses which had become like- 
wise convinced that money voted to that end would go further 
for freedom than any bribes, now responded promptly to the 
call. A naval oxpedition was sent out, and on the 5th of De- 
cember, nine months after his adoption of the new policy, the 



ORATION CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS. 207 

President had a noble opportunity of reporting to the same 
bodies a triumphant justification of his measure. The gallant 
Decatur had established the law of freedom in this quarter for- 
ever. 

Mr. Madison tells the story in these words : 

I have the satisfaction to communicate to you the successful 
termination of the war. The squadi'on in advance on that ser- 
vice under Commodore Decatur lost not a moment after its 
arrival in the Mediterranean in seeking the naval force of the 
enemy then cruising in that sea, and succeeded in capturing two 
of his ships. The high character of the American commander 
was brilliantly sustained on the occasion, who brought his own 
ship into close action with that of his adversary. Having pre- 
pared the way by this demonstration of American skill and 
prowess, he hastened to the port of Algiers, where peace was 
promptly yielded to his victorious force. In the terms stipula- 
ted, the right and honor of the United States were particularly 
consulted by a perpetual relinquishment by the Dey of all pre- 
tence of tribute from them. 

The Dey subsequently betrayed his inclination to break the 
treaty, and ventured to demand a renewal of the annual tribute 
which had been so weakly yielded ; but the hour had passed for 
listening to feeble counsels. The final answer was a declaration 
that the United States preferred war to tribute, and freedom to 
slavery. They therefore insisted upon the observation of the 
treaty, which abolished forever the right to tribute or to the 
enslaving of American citizens. 

There never has been since a question about the navigation 
of the Mediterranean, free from all danger of the loss of per- 
sonal freedom. It is due to the Government of Great Britain 
to add that, following up this example, Lord Exmouth with his 
fleet at last put a final stop to all further pretenses of these bar- 
barians to annoy the navigation of that sea. France has since 
occupied the kingdom of Algiers, and the abolition of slavery 
there was one of its early decrees. Thus has happened the 
liberation of that superb region of the world, the nursery of 
more of its civilization than any other, from all further danger 
of relapsing into barbarism. And America may fairly claim the 



208 OUK NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

credit of having initiated in modern times the law of personal 
freedom over the surface of that classical sea. 

I have now done with the second example of the progress of 
the great principle enunciated in the celebrated scroll set forth 
a hundred years ago. America has contributed greatly to this 
result, but a moment was rapidly approaching when her agency 
was to be invoked in a region much nearer home. The younger 
generations now coming into life will doubtless be astonished to 
learn that not much more than a half a century ago there still 
survived a class of men harbored in the "West Indies, successors 
of the bold buccaneers who, in ihe seventeenth century, became 
the terror to the navigation of those seas. They will wonder 
still more when I tell them that both ships and men were not 
only harbored in some ports of the United States, but were 
actually fitted out with a view to the plunder that might be 
levied upon the legitimate trade pursued by their own country- 
men as well as people of all other nations, in and around the 
islands of the Caribbean Sea. That I am not exagerating in this 
statement, I shall show by merely reading to you a short extract 
from a report made by a committee of the House of Representa- 
tives of the United States in the year 1821: 

" The extent," it says, " to which the system of pluuder is car- 
ried in the West India seas and Gulf of Mexico is truly alarming, 
and calls imperiously for the prompt and efficient interposition 
of the General Government. Some fresh instance of the atrocity 
with which the pirates infesting these seas carry on their depre- 
dations, ACCOMPANIED, TOO, BY THE INDISCRIMINATE MASSACRE OF THE 

defenceless and unoffending, is brought by almost every mail — 
so that the intercourse between the northern and southern sec- 
tions of the Union is almost cut off.'' 

My friends, this picture, painted from an official source, dates 
back little more than fifty years ago ! Could we believe it as 
possible that liberty and life guaranteed by our solemn declara- 
tion of 1776 should have been found so insecure in our own im- 
mediate neighborhood, at a time, too, when we were boasting in 
thousands of orations, on this our anniversary, of the great pro- 
gress we had made in securing both against violence ? And the 
worst of it all was that some even of our own countrymen should 



ORATION — CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS. 209 

have been suspected of being privy to such raids. I shall touch 
this matter no further than to say that not long afterward ade- 
quate preparations were made to remove this pestilent annoy- 
ance, and to re-establish perfect freedom all over these waters^ 
This work was so effectively performed in 1824, that from that 
time to this personal liberty has been as secure there as in any 
other best protected part of the globe. 

Such is my third example of the practical advance of human 
freedom under the trumpet call made one hundred years ago. 

I come now to a fourth and more stupendous measure fol- 
lowing that call. The world-wide famous author of it had not 
been slow to grasp the conception that the abolition of all trade 
in slaves must absolutely follow as a corollary from his general, 
principle. The strongest proof of it is found in the original draft 
of his paper, wherein he directly charged it as one of the great- 
est grievances inflicted upon liberty by the king, that he had 
countenanced the trade. The passage is one of the finest in the 
paper, and deserves to be repeated to-day. It is in these words: 

He has waged cruel war against human nature itself, violating 
its most sacred rights of life and liberty in the person of a dis- 
tant people who never offended him, captivating and carrying 
them into slavery in another hemisphere, or to incur miserable 
death on their transportation thither. This piratical warfare, 
the opprobrium of infidel powers, is the warfare of the Christian 
King of Great Britain. Determined to keep open a market 
where men should be bought and sold, he has prostituted his 
negative for suppressing every legislative attempt to prohibit or 
to restrain the execrable commerce. 

There is no passage so fine as this in the Declaration. Un- 
fortunately it hit too hard on some interests close at home which 
proved strong enough to have it dropped from the final draft. 
But though lost there, its essence almost coeval with the first 
publication of Granville Sharp in England on the same subject, 
undoubtedly pervaded the agitation which never ceased in either 
country until legislation secured a final triumph. The labors of 
Sharp and Wilb erforee, of Clarkson and Buxton, and their com- 
panions, have placed them upon an eminence of honor through- 
out the world. 



210 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

But their struggle which began in 1787, was not terminated 
for a period of twenty years. On the other hand, it appears in 
the statute book in 1794, that it was enacted by the Congress of 
the United States: " That no vessel shall be fitted for the pur- 
pose of carrying on any traffic in slaves to any foreign country, 
or for procuring from any foreign country the inhabitants 
thereof to be disposed of as slaves." This act was followed 
in due course . by others, which, harmonizing with the ac- 
tion of foreign nations, is believed to have put an effective 
and permanent stop to one of the vilest abominations, as con- 
ducted on the ocean, that was ever tolerated in the records of 
time. 

But all this laborious effort had been directed only against 
the cruelties practiced in the transportation of negro slaves over 
the seas. It did not touch the question of his existing condi- 
tion or of his right to be free. 

This brings me to the fifth and greatest of all fruits of the 
charter of Independence, the proclamation of liberty to the cap- 
tive through a great part of the globe. 

The seed that had been sown broadcast over the world fell 
much as described in the Scripture, some of it sprouting too 
early, as in France, and yielding none but bitter fruit, but more, 
after living in the ground many years, producing results most 
propitious to the advancement of mankind. It would be tedious 
for me to go into details describing the progress of a movement 
that has changed the face of civilization. The principle enun- 
ciated in our precious scroll has done its work in Great Britain 
and in France, and most of all in the immense expanse of the 
territories of the Autocrat of all the Russias, who of his own 
mere motion proclaimed that noble decree which liberated from 
serfdom at one stroke twenty-three millions of the human race. 
This noble act will remain forever one of the grandest steps to- 
ward the elevation of mankind ever taken by the will of a sover- 
eign of any race in any age. 

But though freely conceding the spontaneous volition of the 
Czar in this instance, I do not hesitate to affirm that but for 
the subtle essence infused into the political conscience of the 
age by the great Declaration of 1776, he would never have been 



ORATION CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS. 211 

inspired with the lofty magnanimity essential to the completion 
of so great a work. 

I come next and last to the remembrance of the fearful con- 
flict for the complete establishment of the grand principle to 
which we had pledged ourselves at the very outset of our na- 
tional career, and out of which we have, by the blessing of the 
Almighty, come safe and sound. The history is so fresh in our 
minds that there is no need of recalling its details, neither 
would I do so if there were, on a day like this consecrated 
wholly to the harmony of the nation. Never was the first as- 
pect of any contention surrounded by darker clouds; yet view- 
ing as we must its actual issue, at no time has there ever been 
more reason to rejoice in the present and look forward with 
confidence to a still more brilliant future. Now that the agony 
is over, who is there that will not admit that he is not relieved 
by the removal of the ponderous burden which weighed dowm 
our spirits in earlier days ? The great law proclaimed at the 
beginning has been at last fully carried out. No more apologies 
for inconsistency to caviling and evil-minded objectors. No 
more unwelcome comparisons with the superior liberality of 
absolute monarchs in distant regions of the earth. Thank God, 
now there is not a man who treads the soil of this broad land, 
void of offense, who in the eye of the law does not stand on the; 
same level with every other man. If the memorable words of' 
Thomas Jefferson, that true Apostle of Liberty, had d< >ne only 
this it would alone serve to carry him aloft, high up among the 
benefactors of mankind. Not America alone, but Europe and 
Asia, and above all Africa, nay the great globe itself, move in an 
orbit never so resplendent as on this very day. 

Let me then sum up in brief the results arrived at by the 
enunciation of the great law of liberty in 1776 : 

1. It opened the way to the present condition of France. 

2. It brought about perfect security for liberty on the broad 
and narrow seas. 

3. It set the example of abolishing the slave trade, which 
in its turn, prompted the abolition of slavery itself by Great 
Britain, France, Russia, and last of all, by our own country 
too. 



212 orn national jubilee. 

Standing now on this vantage ground, gained from the severe 
struggle of the past, the inquiry naturally presents itself, What 
have we left for us to do? To which I will frankly answer 
much. It is no part of my disposition, even on the brightest of 
our festival days, to deal in indiscriminate laudation, or even to 
cast a flimsy veil over the less favorable aspects of our national 
position. I will not deny that many of the events that have 
happened since our escape from the last great peril, indicate 
more forcibly than I care to admit, some decline front that high 
standard of moral and political purity for which we have ever 
before been distinguished. The adoration of Mammon, de- 
scribed by the poet as the 

" least erected spirit that fell 
From Heaven ; for e'en in Heaven his looks and thoughts 
Were always downward bent." 

has done something to impair the glory earned by all our pre- 
ceding sacrifices. For myself, while sincerely mourning the 
mere possibility of stain touching our garments, I feel not the 
less certainty that the heart of the people remains as pure as 
ever. 

One of the strongest muniments to save us from all harm it 
gives me pride to remind you of, especially on this day — I mean 
the memory of the example of Washington. 

Whatever misfortunes may betide us, of one thing we may be 
sure that the study of that model by the rising youth of our 
land can never fail to create a sanative force potent enough to 
counteract every poisonous element in the political atmosphere. 

Permit me for a few moments to dwell upon this topic, for 
I regard it as closely intertwined with much of the success we 
have hitherto enjoyed as an independent people. Far be it for 
me to raise a visionary idol. I have lived too long to trust in 
mere panegyric. Fulsome eulogy of any man raises with me 
only a smile. Indiscriminate laudation is equivalent to false- 
hood. Washington, as I understand him was gifted with 
nothing ordinarily defined as genius, and he had not had great 
advantages of education. His intellectual powers were clear, 
but not much above the average men of his time. What 
knowledge he possessed had been gained from association with 



ORATION— CHARLES FRANCIS ADAMS. 213 

others in his long career, rather than by study. As an actor he 
scarcely distinguished himself by more than one brilliant stroke ; 
as a writer, the greater part of his correspondence discloses 
nothing more than average natural good sense ; on the field of 
battle his powers pale before the splendid strategy of Napoleon 
Bonaparte. 

Yet, notwithstanding all these deductions, the thread of his 
life from youth to age displays a maturity of judgment, a con- 
sistency of principle, a firmness of purpose, a steadiness of 
action, a discriminating wisdom and a purity of intention hardly 
found united to the sa,me extent in any other instance I can 
recall in history. Of his entire disinterestedness in all his pe- 
cuniary relations with the public it is needless for me to speak. 
Who ever suspected him of a stain ? More than all and above 
all, he was throughout master of himself. If there be one qual- 
ity more than another in his character which may exercise a 
useful control over the men of the present hour, it is the total 
disregard of self, when in the most exalted positions for influence 
and example. 

In order to more fully illustrate my position, let me for one 
moment contrast his course with that of the great military 
chief I have already named. The star of Napoleon was just 
rising to its zenith as that of Washington passed away. In 
point of military genius Napoleon probably equalled if he did 
not exceed any person known in history. In regard to the 
direction of the interests of a nation he may be admitted to 
have held a very high place. He inspired an energy and a 
vigor in the veins of the French people which they sadly need- 
ed after the demoralizing sway of generations of Bourbon kings 
With even a small modicum of the wisdom so prominent in 
Washington, he too might have left a people to honor his 
memory down to the latest times. But it was not to be. Do 
you ask the reason ? It is this. His motives of action always 
centered in self. His example gives a warning but not a guide. 
For when selfishness animates a ruler there is no cause of 
wonder if he sacrifice, without scruple, an entire generation of 
men as a holocaust to the great principle of evil, merely to 
maintain or extend his sway. Had Napoleon copied the exam- 



214- OUE NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

pie of Washington lie might have been justly the idol of all 
later generations in France. For Washington to have copied 
the example of Napoleon would have been simply impossible. 

Let as then, discarding all inferior strife, hold up to our 
children the example of Washington as the symbol not merely 
of wisdom, but of purity and truth. 

Let us labor continually to keep the advance in civilization 
as it becomes us to do after the struggles of the past, so that 
the rights to life and liberty and the pursuit of happiness, which 
we have honorably secured, may be firmly entailed upon the 
ever enlarging generations of mankind. 

And what is it, I pray you tell me, that has brought us to the 
.celebration of this most memorable day ? Is it not the steady 
cry of Excelsior up to the most elevated regions of political 
purity, secured to us by the memory of those who have passed 
before us and consecrated the very ground occupied by their 
ashes? Glorious iadeed may it be said of it in the words of 
the poet : 

What's hallow'd ground ? 'Tis what gives birth 
To sacred thoughts in souls of worth — 
Peace ! Independence ! Truth ! go forth 

Earth's compass round, 
And your high priesthood shall make earth 

All Hallowed Grown*. 



THE NEW CENTUKY, 

AN ABSTRACT FROM BENJAMIN FRANKLIN THOMAS' 

ADDRESS. 

DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION, MECHANICS HALL, WOR- 
CESTER, MASS., JULY 4th, 187G. 

With what emotions, with what convictions, did we hail the 
dawning light of the new century! Were the wings of the 
morning those of the angel of death or of life, of despair or of 
hope ? I answer for myself, of life and of hope ; nay, more, of 
faith and of trust. We have causes for anxiety and watchful- 
ness, none for despair. The evils of the times are not incurable, 
and the remedies, simple and efficient are in our hands. 

Is there not, I am asked, wide-spread and growing corrup- 
tion in the public service of States and nation ? There is cor- 
ruption, but not, I think, increasing — indeed we have reason to 
hope it is already checked in its progress ; nor are the causes of 
the evil permanent in their nature, save that we always hold our 
" treasures in earthen vessels." 

We have passed through a period of expenditure almost with- 
out limit, and, therefore, of infinite temptations. Wars, it 
would seem, especially civil wars, loosen the moral ties of so- 
ciety. " The state of man suffers, then, the nature of an insur- 
rection." Civil convulsions always brings more or less bad men 
to the surface, and some are still afloat — men whose patriotism, 
not exhausted in contracts for effete muskets, spavined horses 
and rotten ships, are ready and waiting for like service. In the 
feverish delirious haste to get rich which a currency of indefin- 
it expansion always excites, we find another cause ; though 
this has disastrous results, more direct and palpable, in unset- 
tling values and the foundations of public and private faith, 
trust and confidence. 

The evils are curable, but not by noise of words, not by 
sonorous resolutions without meaning, or only the meaning the 
simple reader injects into them. 



216 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

We may put an end to corruption by leading ourselves honest 
lives, by refusing to put any man into a public trust, no matter 
what his qualifications or past services, who is corrupt, or suf- 
fers himself to walk on the brink, or winks at those who are 
wading in ; by using the old-fashioned prescriptions for riders : 
"Men of truth, hating covetousness." "Thou shalt take no 
gift." "Ye shall not be afraid of the face of man." 

The evils of a vde currency can be remedied only by return 
to the path of the Constitution and of commercial integrity. 
The principles are simple and elementary. The " lawful money" 
of the United States is the coin of the United States, or for- 
eign coin whoso value has been regulated by Congress : that is 
the constitutional doctrine. Money is a tiling of intrinsic value, 
and the standard and measure of value ; that is the economical 
doctrine. 

A promise to pay a dollar is not a dollar : that is the doctrine 
of morality and common sense. The difficulty with the legal 
tender law was and is that it sought to vitalize a falsehood, to 
make the shadow the substance, to sign the thing signified, the 
promise to pay, itself payment. Great as is the power of Con- 
gress, it cannot change the nature of things. 

So long as the power is left, or assumed to be left, to make a 
promise to pay payment, there will be no permanent security. 

One other cure of corruption is open to us, — the stamping out 
of the doctrine that public trusts are the spoils of partisan vic- 
tory. The higher councils may perhaps be changed. An 
administration cannot be well conducted with a cabinet, or other 
officers in confidential relations, opposed to its policy ; but no 
such reason for change applies to ninety-nine hundredths of 
the offices now exposed in the market as rewards for partisan 
service. Other than in these evils I fail to see proofs of the 
degeneracy of the times. 

Whether the men and women of this generation had fallen 
from the standard of their fathers and mothers, we had satis- 
factory evidence in the late war, I care not to dwell upon its 
origin or to revive its memories. The seceding States reaped as 
they had sown; having sown to the wind, they reaped the 
whirlwind. Against what was to them the most beneficient of 



ADDRESS — BENJAMIN FRANKLIN THOMAS. 217 

governments, known and felt only in its blessings, they waged, 
it seemed to us, causeless war, for their claim to extend slavery 
into the new States and Territories never had solid ground of 
law or policy or humanity to rest upon ; they struck at the nag 
in which were enfolded our most precious hopes for ourselves 
and for mankind. They could not expect a great nation to be 
so false to duty as not to defend, at every cost, its integrity and 
life. 

But while, as matter of good sense and logic, the question 
seemed to us so plain a one, that the Union meant nothing if a 
State might at its election withdraw from it ; that under the 
Articles of Confederation the Union had been made perpetual ; 
that the Constitution was adapted to form a more " perfect 
union than that of the Confederation, more comprehensive, 
direct, and efficient in power, and not less durable in time ; 
that there was no word in it looking to separation ; that it had 
careful provisions for its amendment, none for its abrogation ; 
capacity for expansion, none for contraction ; a door for new 
States to come in, none for old or new to go out ; we should 
find that, after all, upon the question of legal construction, 
learned and philosophical statesmen had reached a different 
conclusion ; we should find, also, what as students of human 
nature we should be surprised not to find, that the opinions of 
men on this question had, at different times and in different sec- 
tions of the country, been more or less moulded, biased and 
warped by the effects, or supposed effects, which the policy of 
the central power had on the material interests and institu- 
tions of the States. Each examination, not impairing the 
strength of our convictions, might chasten our pride. 

But aside from the logic, men must be assumed to be honest, 
however misguided, who are ready to die for the faith that is in 
them. 

But not dwelling upon causes, but comparing the conduct of 
the war with that of the Revolution, I do not hesitate to say 
that in the loyalty and devotion of the people to country ; in the 
readiness to sacrifice property, health and life for her safety ; in 
the temper and spirit in which the war was carried on ; in the 
supply of resources to the army, men as well as money ; in the 



218 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

blessed ministrations of women to the sick, wounded or dying 
soldier ; in the courage and pluck evinced on both sides ; in the 
magnanimity and forbearance of the victors, the history of the 
late war shows no touch of degeneracy, shows, indeed, a century 
of progress. 

If its peculations and corruptions were more conspicuous, it 
was because of the vaster amounts expended, and the vastly 
greater opportunities and temptations to avarice and fraud. The 
recently published letters of Col. Pickering furnish additional 
evidence of the frauds and peculations in the supplies to the 
armies of the Revolution, and of the neglect of the states to pro- 
vide food and clothing for the soldiers, when many of the peo- 
ple, for whose liberties they were struggling, were living in com- 
parative ease and luxuary. The world moves. 

There is one criterion of which I cannot forbear to speak, the 
conduct of the soldiers of the late war upon the return of 
peace. How quietly and contentedly they came back from the 
excitements of the battle-field and camp to the quiet of home 
life, and to all the duties of citizenship ; with a coat, perhaps, 
where one sleeve was useless, with a leg that had a crutch for a 
comrade, but with the heart always in the right place ! 

The burdens of the war are yet with us ; the vast debt created 
these heavy taxes, consuming the very seed of future harvests ; 
the vacant seats at the fireside. Fifteen years and half a gene- 
ration of men have passed away since the conflict of opinion 
ripened into the conflict of arms. They have been years of 
terrible anxiety and of the sickness of hope deferred ; yet if 
their record could be blotted from the book of life, if the grave 
could give up its noble dead, and all the waste spots, moral and 
material, resume the verdure of the spring-time, no one of us 
would return to the state of things in 1860, with the curse of 
slavery hanging over us and the fires of discord smouldering be- 
neath us. The root of alienation, bitterness, and hate has been 
wrenched out, and henceforth union and peace are at least pos- 
sible. 

But there is left to us a great and solemn trust, — four mil- 
lions of people, whose civil status has been fixed by the organic 
law, but whose education and training for the duties of citi- 



ADDRESS — BENJAMIN FHANKLIX TUUMAS. 219 

zenship aud all the higher duties of life, at whatever cost, is de- 
manded alike by humanity, our sense of justice, and our sense 
of safety. 

We have no right, and no cause, to despair of the republic. 

The elements of material prosperity are all with us ; this 
magnificent country, resonant^ with the murmurs of two oceans, 
with every variety of soil climate, and production to satisfy the 
the tastes or wants of man ; with its millions of acres of new- 
lands beckoning for the plough and spade ; with its mountains 
of coal and iron and copper, and its veins of silver and gold 
waiting like Encaladus to be delivered ; its lakes, inland seas, 
its rivers the highways of nations. We have bound its most 
distant parts together with bands of iron and steel ; we send 
the lightnings over it " that they may go, and say unto us, Here 
we are." 

We have all the tools of the industries, and arts which the 
cunning brain of man has invented and his supple fingers 
learned to use, and abundant capital, the reserved fruits of 
labor, seeking a chance for planting and increase. 

The means of intellectual growth are with us. We have in 
most of the States systems of education opening to every child 
the paths to knowledge and to goodness ; destined, we hope, 
to be universal. He who in our day has learned to read in his 
mother-tongue may be said to have all knowledge for his 
empire . 

And our laws, though by no means perfect, were never so wise, 
equal, and just as now, never so infused with the principles 
of natural justice and equity, nor their administration more 
intelligent, upright, less a respector of persons, than to-day. 
Indeed, in no department of human thought and activity has 
there been in the last century more intelligent progress than in 
our jurisprudence. 

Whatever may be said of creeds and formulas of faith, there 
never was so much practical Christianity as now ; as to wealth, 
so large a sense of stewardship ; as to labor, so high a recog- 
nition of its rights and dignity ; into the wounds of suffering 
humanity never the pouring of so much oil and wine ; never 
was man as man, or woman as woman, of such worth as to-day. 






220 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

In spite of criticism we have yet the example and inspiration 
of that life in which the human and the divine were blended 
into one. 

la spite of philosophy, God yet sits serenely on his throne, 
His watchful providence over us, Ilis almighty arm beneath us 
and upholding us. 

For an hundred years this nation, having in trust the largest 
hopes of freedom and humanity, has endured. There have 
been whirlwind and tempest, it has ridden through them, bend- 
ing only, as Landor says, the oak bends before the passing 
wind, to rise again in its majesty and in its strength. It has 
come out of the fiery furnace of civil war, its seemingly mortal 
plague-spot cauterized and burnt out, leaving for us to-day a 
Republic capable of almost infinite expansion, in which central 
power may be reconciled with local independence, and the 
largest liberty with the firmest Drder. 

Staunch, with every sail set, her flag with no star erased, 
this goodly Ship of State floats on the bosom of the new cen- 
tury. 

In her we " have garnered up our hearts where we must 
either live or bear no life." 

And now, God of our fathers, what wait we for but thy bless- 
ing ? Let thy breath fill her sails, thy presence be her sun- 
shine. If darkness and the tempest come, give her, as of old, 
pilots that can weather the storm. 



THE COSTOF POPULAK LIBERTY. 

AN ORATION BY BROOKS ADAMS, ESQ., 

DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BINGHAM, MASS., 
JULY 4th, 1876. 

Fellow-citizens : On this solemn anniversary we do not come 
together — if I understand our feelings rightly — to indulge in 
vainglorious self-praise of our fathers or ourselves. Nor do we 
come here to lash ourselves once more into anger over the well- 
known story of the wrongs our fathers suffered at the hands of 
the English people. "We come here neither in pride nor bit- 
terness. We bear malice towards none. We are at peace with 
all the world. What we do come for is to celebrate what we 
believe to have been a great era in the world's history, to call to 
mind the principles which were declared one hundred years ago 
to-day, to rejoice over the blessings which this people have in- 
herited through the patriotism and the wisdom of our fore- 
fathers, and above all to ask ourselves on this Centennial 
day whether we have been acting up to the standard they 
laid down for us, and whether we are doing our duty by our 
country and our age. That three millions of people should have 
been able to contend with the whole power of Great Britain, 
and to wring from her an acknowledgment of their independ- 
ence, is indeed surprising, but that alone would throw but a 
comparatively feeble light upon the early patriots. Other colo- 
nies have also gained their independence, whose people have 
Little reason to celebrate their nation's birthday. What makes 
this day remarkable is not so much that on it our independence 
was declared as that on its birth was given to popular govern- 
ment, and the glory of our ancestors lies not so much in having 
waged a successful war as in having been the first to teach the 
lesson to mankind.that institutions resting safely on the popular 
will can endure. Yet the men of that day were neither dream- 
ers nor enthusiasts. They did not want independence for its 



222 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

own sake. They would have been perfectly content to have re- 
mained English subjects had they been allowed to manage their 
little governments as they had been accustomed, and to enjoy 
the rights they had always enjoyed. But they were not a race 
of men to endure oppression patiently. They loved liberty as 
they understood it, and as we understand it, more than any- 
thing on earth, and to preserve it they were willing to brave the 
greatest power of the world. 

II. 

We all know the history of the war, how it begun at Lex- 
Tho I'.eginning of ington and Concord and dragged through seven 
Government, bloody, weary years, and until it closed on the 
day when Gen. Lincoln, of Hingham, received the sword of Lord 
Cornwalhs on the surrender of Yorktown. During those years 
this State and this town did their part, as they have always 
done in the time of trial, and as they probably always will do so 
long as the old Puritan stock remains. Meanwhile the colonies, 
having thrown off their old Government, went on to organize a 
new one. Peace found the country ravaged, war-worn, ruined, 
and under Confederation. The Declaration of Independence 
had boldly declared not only the right but the capacity of the 
people for self-government. The task yet remained before them 
of reconstructing their Government and thus redeeming the boast 
that had been made. For th e first time in the world's history pop- 
ular institutions were really upon trial, and it seemed as though 
they were doomed to meet with disastrous failure. How can I 
describe that wretched interval, the gloomiest years in American 
history. The confederation hardly deserved the name of Gov- 
ernment. There were enemies abroad, there was dissension at 
home. Congress had no power to levy taxes, so that not only 
the interest on the public debt, but the most ordinary expenses 
remained unpaid. There was a debased currency, there were 
endless jealousies between the States, there was mutiny in the 
army, imbecility in Congress — the people were poor and dis- 
contented, and at length a rebellion broke at her in Massachu- 
setts which threatened to overthrow the foundation of society. 
The greatest and best of men — Washington, himself, was in do- 



OBATION BROOKS ADAMS. 'I'J'.l 

spair. It was then that the intelligence and power of the Ameri- 
can people showed itself, it was then that they justified the 
boast of the Declaration of Independene, it was then that they 
established Government. 

No achievement of any people is more wonderful than this. 
Without force or bloodshed, but by means of fair agreement 
alone difficulties were solved which had seemed to admit of no 
solution. At this distance Ox" time we can look back calmly, and 
we can appreciate the wisdom and self-control of men who 
could endure such trials and pass through action without an ap- 
peal to arms. And they had their awards. Nothing has ever 
equaled the splendor of their success. From the year 1789 to 
the year 18G0, no nation has ever known a more unbounded 
prosperity, a fuller space of happiness. In the short space of 
70 years, within the turn of a single life, the nation, poor, weak 
and dispised. raised itself to the pinnacle of power and of glory. 

At the outbreak of the Revolution 3,000.000 of people, a far 
smaller number than the population of New York now, were 
scattered along the Atlantic Coast from Maine to Georgia. 
There were no interior settlements. Where the great cities of 
Buffalo and Rochester now are there were then only Indians and 
deer. Boston had but 14,000 inhabitants, there were no manu- 
factures, everything was imported from abroad. Within those 
70 or 80 years all changed as if by magic. Population increas- 
ed ten-fold, cities sprang up in the wilderness, manufactories 
were established, wealth grew beyond all computation. And 
better than mere material prosperity, our history was stainad by 
no violence. We had no State executions, no reigning terror, 
no guillotine, no massacre. We tolerated all religious beliefs. 
There was perfect liberty and secmity for all men. Nor is this 
the highest praise to which our people are justly due. No purer 
men or greater statesmen ever lived than those whose lives 
adorn the early history of the Republic. Men who had never 
seen a great city, men tvhose hole experience had not extended 
further than the local assembly of their colon}' or the provincial 
corn-fields, wrote the Declaration of Independence!, and framed 
the Constitution of our States. We read their writings now, 
we wonder at them, but we do not dream equaling them our- 



4 



224 OUE NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

selves. There seemed no end to them. Orators, statesmen, 
judges, Washington and Jefferson, Franklin and Marshall, men 
who will be remembered and honored so long as our language 
shall endure. 

m. 

But with all the blessings we inherited from our ancestors we 
Slavery, inherited a curse also — the curse of negro slavery. It 
is easy now to see how the bitterness of the South as we should 
wish to be received were we Southerners. Let us rather re- 
member that they fought by our fathers' side through seven 
long years in the war of the Revolution, and that a year ago 
Southern soldiers marched through the streets of Boston under 
the old flag to celebrate with us the victory of Bunker Hill. And 
now on this our nation's birthday, in the midst of peace, with 
our country more wealthy and more populous than ever before, 
are we content ? Can we look over the United States and 
honestly tell ourselves that all things are well within us ? We 
cannot conceal from ourselves that all things are not well. For 
the last ten years a shameless corruption has gone on about us. 
We see it on every side. We read of it daily in the newspapers 
until we sicken with disgust. It has not been confined to any 
section or state, or city, to either political party, or to any de- 
partment of Government. It has been all-pervading. 

IV. 

One hundred years ago to-day birth was given to this nation 
Political in its struggle for the rights of men. On this day 
Party. if on no other we can rise above our party ties, we 
can feel that we are all citizens of a common country striving for 
a common cause, members of a common party, all Republicans, 
all Democrats. We may differ as to the means but we agree 
upon the end. We all long for a great and respected country, 
for a happy and united people between the North and South 
slowly grew until it burst into civil war. And truly that war 
did continue until every drop of blood drawn by the last had 
been repaid by another drawn by the sword. Though years 
have passed by, which of us does not remember the awful agony 



ORATION BKOOKS ADAMS. 225 

of that struggle, the joy at the news of victory, the gloom after 
defeat. Even now when we recall those days we feel the old 
rage arise within ns, the old bitterness return. Not far from 
these doors stands the statue of Massachusetts' greatest 
Governor — Mr. Andrews. Truly his life should teach us that 
as men are good and brave, so are thej hind and forgiving. 
Surely he would not have cherished resentment toward a con- 
quered foe. Surely he would have bsen the last to preach the 
doctrine of internal hate. Surely Mr. Lincoln was full of kind- 
ness toward the South. If ever we are again to have a united 
people, we must learn to feel as he felt. We must remember 
men will never be good citizens who are treated with suspicion 
and distrust. We must, above all things, teach ourselves to be 
just. We must remember that the foundation of this govern- 
ment is equal laws for all, and that there cannot be one law for 
Massachusetts and another for Virginia. 

The issues of the war are dead ; Slavery is abolished, never 
to be revived ; it is forbidden by the Constitution, and we have 
the means to enforce obedience should any disobey. No State 
will ever again support the cause which has been trampeled in 
the dust by national armies. Let us then remember this Cen- 
tennial year by forgetting sectional differences. Let us receive 
them as brothers. There are certain duties which the citizen 
owes this country that cannot be thrown aside, and the first of 
these duties is to see that the Government is pure. The strug- 
gles of the Democrats and Federalists of three-quarters of a 
century ago no longer excites us. Tet we see two parties, each 
believing in themselves in the right, and each fighting fiercely 
for what they believe. We know what the Democrats were. 
We know that under their will the country was prosperous and 
happy, and we are justified in believing that had victory been 
reversed, the country would have prospered still. What matters 
it to us to which political party Washington, Jefferson, Madison, 
or Jay belonged ? We know that they were great and wise, 
and we honor them and love them as American citizens. What 
does it matter to us if the people and the men they chose to 
govern them were intelligent and honest, and made the 
American name feared and respected throughout the world. 



226 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

There may not be among us men equal to the early patriots, 
men whose names will still be remembered when this nation 
has passed away, but we have men whose honor is as stainless, 
whose lives are as pure, and who, if they cannot bring genius. 
can at least bring integrity and devotion to the public service. 
We have no standing army, no aristocracy. The whole future 
of our society rests on the respect the people feel for law. 
Laws can only be respected when the laws themselves, the men 
who make them, and the men who administer them command 
our respect. If the time shall ever come when American 
judges shall habitually sell justice, when American legislators 
shall sell their votes, and the public servants the nation's 
honor, all respect for our institutions will die in the minds of 
our people, and the Government born one hundred years ago 
to-day will be about to pass away. 



The question even now forces itself upon us, what do the 
Official Cor- things that are about us portend ? Is all that we 
ruption. have seen and heard only the sign of a passing evil, 
which we may hope to cure, or does it show that we are already 
the victims of that terrible disease which has so often been the 
ruin of republics ? Is the very glory and splendor of the nation 
to prevent its ruin, and do its wealth and prosperity bear out, 
then, the seeds of decay ? Our fathers were small and scat- 
tered people — sober, frugal and industrious. There was no 
great wealth, nor was then extreme poverty. Most men were 
farmers, and had that best and most practical of all education 
— the management of their own property, the process of gov- 
ernment comparatively simple, and the temptations compara- 
tively small. In a century all this has changed ; we are forty 
millions of people instead of three millions ; we are crowded 
together in great cities ; we have railways and manufactures ; 
we have huge aspirations, vast wealth. But side by side with 
our beautiful churches and rich colleges there exists, where the 
population is dense, much poverty and ignorance. On the 
other hand, men are assailed by all the tempaiions of a rich 
and complex society. In the history of the past few years that 



ORATION BEOOKS ADAMS. 



227 



evil has slowly gained strength ; a class of men are beginning 
to hold office, with the approbation of the people, whose object 
is plunder ; a class who look upon the public revenues as a 
fund from which to steal — nay, more, who seek public offices 
for motives of private gain by using their influence to make 
money for themselves. 

VI. 
There we already sse the beginning of the end. No popular 
Necessity of government can endure which does not do justice, 
a Change. much less one which is systematically perverted. 
No government can endure which allows the property of its 
citizens to oe taken from them under the guise of taxes, not 
for profitable purposes, but to satisfy private greed. These 
abuses came with ring rule, and there is hardly a rich city or a 
great State in the Union which does not know the meaning of 
government by rings. Corrupt courts, enormous taxes, ruinous 
debts, impure politics, are the consequences, and the conse- 
quences we have seen. If we have now arrived at the point 
where we feel ring government gradually closing in upon us ; 
if the majority of the people has not the power or the intelli- 
gence, or the will, not only to protect themselves against fresh 
assaults, but to purify society from taint, this is for us indeed a 
gloomy anniversary, and our hope can be but small. In such a 
struggle to stand still is to be conquered. Nothing in the 
world is stationary, and if government does not diminish it 
will assuredly increase. 

I do not believe there is excuse for gloom. We know the 
people with whom we have always lived, and we know that they 
are neither dishonest nor ignorant, and I do not believe that 
the people of the other States in the Union are behind the peo- 
ple of Massachusetts. But there are also other better reasons 
for confidence. This the generation which carried through the 
war ; no sterner test could be applied to any people. There 
was no constraint upon them ; peace was always within their 
reach ; it could have been attained at any time had the majority 
desired it. 

After brief allusions to the prominent causes for hope, the 
speaker concluded as follows : 



228 



OUB NATIONAL JUBILEE. 



Fellow-citizens, believing as I do that our institutions are 
wise and good, believing as I do that, properly administered, 
they yield to us the fullest measure of happiness, believing that 
our people are essentially the same as the people cf one hun- 
dred years ago — equally honest, equally intelligent, equally 
self-sacrificing — I see no cause for despondency in the future, I 
see reason for brightest hope. Provided we remember that our 
responsibilities are as great now as they ever have been during 
our history — provided we keep in mind the warning of Wash- 
ington, that the price of liberty is eternal vigilance — provided 
we are awake to the knowledge that abuses which are tolerated 
may in time overpower us — there lies before this Republic the 
happiest future which any nation has ever been permitted to 
enjoy ; a future as happy and as glorious as its past. Let us 
then, in this centennial year, putting aside all personal ambi- 
tion and all selfish aims, firmly resolve that we will strive hon- 
estly, patiently, humbly, in the position in which God has placed 
us, to regain that noble purity in which our nation was born, 
pre-eminent to the end that our children, at another centennial, 
may say of us that they too had their ink'well in the world's 
history, and through them this Government of the people for 
the people by the people still endureth. 



AMEEICAN FREE INSTITUTIONS; THE JOY AND 
GLORY OF MANKIND. 

AN ADDRESS BY DR. J. J. M. SELLMAN, 

delivered at the centennial celebration, baltimore, md., 
july 4th, 1876 

My fellow citizens, could there be anything more expressive 
and so eminently fitting than to see the people gathering to- 
gether in their respective neighborhoods at the early dawn of 
the Centennial anniversary of our national independence? 
Does it not evince a profound reverence and love for the great 
fundamental principjes that underlie the foundation of this free 
republic ? Esteeming our inheritance as the richest that was 
ever bequeathed to mankind, we cannot but most tenderly and 
lovingly remember what heroism and extreme suffering those 
noble men and women of the revolutionary period were required 
to have and endure in nurturing that spirit of independence 
for which we as a nation are so characteristic and pre-eminently 
distinguished. 

"We might recall names, depict m stirring words the patriotic 
deeds, and portray in glowing pictures the spirit that animated 
them in making such a sacrifice upon their part, in behalf of 
that freedom, that was the precursor of such transcendant 
glory and renown to the remotest generations. But my friends, 
I am prescribed by the want of time from pursuing this most 
interesting course under present circumstances. Fully appre- 
ciating the noble work and unparelleled sacrifices of our illus- 
trious sires of revolutionary fame, it will be no disparagement 
to say that others in later generations have also helped to mould 
our institutions and shape the policy of the government, and 
that we too have our part in this beneficient work commenced 
by the noble men of 1776. 

It is well, my friends, to continue our accustomed Fourth of 



230 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

July celebration, and endeavor to increase, if possible, the pub- 
lic interest in that most sacred day. To feel otherwise than joy- 
ous upon such an occasion would not be in consonance with 
the inherent sentiment of the genius of the American people, 
who are so well-grounded and settled in the faith and spirit so 
eloquently set forth in the incomparable declaration of princi- 
ples enunciated and proclaimed a century ago. The spirit of 
our devotion to the sacred principles of Constitutional Free 
Government does not grow cold and indifferent or less vivacious 
by the lapse of time, though it be a century, but is ever increas- 
ing by the development of the transcendant beauty, beneii- 
cient designs of the patriotic architects of our great inher- 
itance. 

We all know how our hearts glow with patriotic ardor at the 
bare mention of the day which marks our Nation's birth — fathers 
and mothers teach their little ones to lisp and revere the day 
sacred to the American Independence, and the palid cheek of 
age flushes with enthusiasm, and the dim eye kindles with 
patriotic fire, when memory brings the scenes of other days 
around them, and pass in review the hallowed names of our 
illustrious sires, who dedicated their lives and fortunes to secure, 
preserve and maintain the immortal principles of representative 
self-government, which had been enunciated by the protest of a 
gallant people determined to be free. My friends, the -fourth 
day of July is and should always be a festal day which we as a 
nation might joyfully commemorate. 

The custom of reading the Declaration of Independence 
ought to have real practical value, but it has become somewhat 
common -placed, and is regarded only as a primary lesson of 
constitutional government, having grown from infancy to 
maturity, does not lessen the value of keeping those essential 
principles ever fresh in our hearts and memories. I do not, 
however, propose to read that sound and practical lesson before 
breakfast, my friends, but there are times when it might be read 
with great profit. 

A recurrence to first principles sometimes is most important, 
and cannot it be said with emphasis that of late years both 
government and people have drifted far away from the essential 



ADDRESS DK. J. J. M. SLLLMAN. 231 

rudiments of republican education, and that a return to those 
elementary principles of const itutioual government would have 
a very salutary effect upon the political tone of the republic. 
Political safety and happiness, my friends, depends largely upon 
a strict adhesion to the immortal principles of a free and 
independent government. 

So resplendant and promising are our possessions and pros- 
pects, we must not permit human ambition and treacherous 
baseness to despoil our precious and dear-bought inheritance. 

I am confident it is in keeping with this sound sentiment 
that we come here to welcome in this Centennial birthday of our 
nation, and to give some public expression to the ardor of our 
hearts and minds in relation to this interesting epoch in our 
national history. 

It was this holy sentiment that developed into action the 
mighty energies of the men who secured the liberties we now 
so richly enjoy, and from which, by wise and ardent devotion, 
the glorious edifice upon which rest the pillars of the rights 
of self-government and the inestimable prerogative of freedom 
of conscience. Those noble men who came out of the Revolu- 
tionary struggle for Independence, with a holy love for freedom 
erected and dedicated this beautiful temple to liberty and free 
conscience, whose foundation is a mighty continent, the bound- 
aries of which shall reach and extend from ocean to ocean. 

American free institutions is this beautiful temple, and stands 
this day in all its majestic beauty, the pride of history, the joy 
and glory of mankind ; tenderer and more devoted, higher and 
holier than aught on earth save a mother's love, is the almost 
divine sentiment which makes us love and cherish the land of 
our birth. And now at this auspicious time, at the very begin- 
ning of this, the second century of our political experience, let 
us, if we would have the same patriotic and fraternal feeling that 
distinguished the period of the event which we this clay com- 
memorate, draw nearer and nearer to a higher appreciation of 
the true principles of constitutional government. If the spirit of 
the nation be entirely directed towards wise ends and purposes, 
what an endless source of happiness would be felt throughout 
the wide extent of this great republic. The noble superstruction 



232 



OUK NATIONAL JUBILEE. 



erected by the agonizing struggles of the Revolutionary sires, 
and baptised with their patriotic blood, cau only be preserved 
and kept secure by pristine authority and respect for those immor- 
tal principles whereby every human being in the land, of every 
race and condition, may enjoy equal protection and privilege. In 
lieu of discord and distrust, we should have more fraternal feel- 
ing between all sections of the country, every element of dis- 
turbance should be removed, that all may share in an undimmed 
glory of American institutions. Ours should be a government 
that all can love and rever, from the pure motive of reverence 
and love. 

We want a patriotism, my friends, that will knit together all 
the people in one loving brotherhood, that shall have no limit 
other than the wide domain over which the nation's flag so 
proudly floats. It is the sentiment thus acting upon free institu- 
tions, and again re-acting through them upon the people that 
constitute their public spirit and political genius. My fellow- 
citizens, are we not confronted at this very moment with a crisis 
freighted with great responsibility, and what shall be the result, 
if we fail to improve the opportunity and rise to the full mea- 
sure of these responsibilities ? The public mind and morals of 
the nation has become sordid and reckless, the innocent and 
confiding people, nauseated and disgusted, until at last the mo- 
ral goodness of the masses have become alarmed in the interest 
of republican institutions and of a pure government. 

This land of religious, civil and political freedom can only be 
preserved by a strict adherance to the sacred principles enunciat- 
ed in the Declaration of Independence. To me the most hope- 
ful sign of the times is the evident desire in the public mind to 
purify the political atmosphere, and to eradicate all taint of 
corruption that now pervades it, and get back to the better 
principles of the early days of the Republic. Corruption has grown 
stronger and stronger, until it has permeated every avenue of pub- 
lic and private life, resulting chiefly from the apathy and indiffer- 
ence of the people in choosing their representative men. 

If we would have a pure National, State or Municipal govern- 
ment, we must insist upon putting into places of honor and re- 
sponsibility, none other than men of recognized probity and in- 



ADDRESS DR. J. J. M. SKLLMAN. 233 

tegrity. In no other way may you expect to see disseminated 
throughout the land those broad, deep, and lofty sentiments, 
whereby the moral sense of the Republic may be restored. We 
must ignore to a great extent this party fealty, that is the bar- 
rier to a full and faithful expression of the better judgment. If 
we would strictly adhere to the inflexible rule laid down by the 
early Fathers, in the choosing of our public servants, we should 
soon realize a change for the better. Is he honest ? is he com- 
petent ? was their test. 

All the vague and unmeaning promises and political plat- 
forms avail nothing for good, but only serve the purposes for 
which they are intended — namely, to mystify and delude the 
honest public sentiment. It is in the strength and moral good- 
ness of the people that we can look with confidence for the re- 
generating and revivifying power whereby the national Constitu- 
tion may be restored to pristine soundness. My hope for the pros- 
perity and perpetuity of this nation is anchored upon this strong- 
tower of strength. The platform of an intelligent mind, and an 
honest heart that can rise above all political chicanery, is of in- 
finite more value than aught else beside. 

I speak plainly, my friends, because of the magnitude of our 
responsibilities. Each generation has its part to perform in the 
extension and promotion of the free institutions of this great 
republic. It is true the foundation laid by the skillful hands of 
the early Fathers is broad, deep and strong, and cemented with 
patriotic blood. But it is for each generation in its turn to con- 
tribute its best material, that they may add beauty to beauty 
and strength to strength, until its magnetic proportions and 
resplendant glory shall reach out and over all the countless ages 
to come. 

With all the grevious mistakes of the past century (and there 
have been many), it is a source of pride and satisfaction to every 
lover of his country to witness the unparalleled progress made 
in science, literature and mechanic arts; and when coupled 
with the wonderful agricultural and mining products of the 
republic, we can have some faint idea and appreciate the im- 
measurable stores of wealth that is yet to flow into our already 
well filled cup. O, my friends, America's free institutions and 



23i OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

her rich agricultural soil and mineral wealth is without a coun- 
terpart. It is only in yonder Exposition building where the 
products of the soil and the skillful industry of all nations are 
brought into comparison, that any delicate idea can be found of 
the mighty power that is felt, and what a transcendant hale of 
glory encircles the very name of American institutions. The ef- 
fulgent rays of freedom's light are penetrating far and wide into 
the heretofore dark and misty minds of other nations, yet un- 
blessed with free institutions and political privileges as we are. 
I pray we may now, at the beginning of this the second centu- 
ry, take a long step forward in the true path of progress, which 
must necessarily connect us with all advanced ideas that tend 
to the further developement of knowledge, that leads to the dis- 
covery of all truth. 

I extend my hearty centennial congratulations, and invite you 
to join me in one more thought that is suggestive of my own 
feelings upon this interesting occasion which I have embodied 
in the following words: 

Unfold the nation's flag, fling its folds to the breeze, 
Let it float o'er these hills, as well as the seas; 
Let the old and the young unitedly stand 
To defend and protect the flag of the land. 
Lift it up, wave it high, 'tis as bright as of old, 
Not a stain on its purity, not a blot on its fold; 
Lift it up, 'tis the old banner of red, white and blue, 
'Tis the sunburst resplendent, far flashing its hue. 
Look aloft look aloft, lo ! the sunbeams coming down 
Are its folds not emblazoned with deeds of renown, 
Through triumph and victory for one hundred long years; 
Beautiful banner, baptised with blood and with tears. 
Behold, behold the clouds passing by, 
Are we not reminded how time has to die ; 
Let we then, while we can, render homage and love 
To the flag of the nation and the God that's above. 



OUR FLAG-THE PROUD EMBLEM OF THE 
REPUBLIC. 

AN ADDRESS BY GEN. FERDINAND 0. LATROBE, MAYOR OF 
BALTIMORE. 

DELIVERED AT BALTIMORE, MD., JULY 4tH, 1876. 

Gentlemen : — On behalf of the Commissioners of Harlem 
Park, I accept the beautiful flag which you have this day pre- 
sented. Our country's flog, the most fitting gift to be made on 
her one hundreth birthday. What recollections crowd upon 
us on this Fourth of July, 1876 ! One hundred years ago on 
this most blessed day, there assembled in Independence Hall, 
in the City of Philadelphia, a band of patriots, who bravely, 
fearlessly proclaimed to the world that immortal declaration, 
written by Jefferson, which created a new nation among the 
powers of the earth. A century has elapsed, and from those 
original thirteen States has grown this mighty confederation 
known as the United States of America. The flag thrown to 
the breeze in 1 76 has withstood the battle and the storm ; and 
now triumphantly waves over thirty-eight great States, and fifty 
millions of free and independent citizens. Based upon free 
institutions, free speech, free thought, and free schools, our 
Union rests upon an imperishable rock foundation, that only 
hardens with the test of a century. What a triumph for 
Republican institutions. 

The birth of our country was not peaceful. One could sup- 
pose on reading the words of the declaration that the expression 
of such sentiments, such " self-evident truths," would have 
brought forth shouts of gladness and congratulations from the 
enlightened nations of the world ; but the greeting received was 
from mouths of shotted cannon, the rattling of steel ramrods, 
the sharpening of swords, and the whitening of the ocean with 
the sails of transports, bearing armed men across the sea to 
stamp out the bursting bud of liberty before it should bloom 
into the flower of eternal life. 



236 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

During seven long years of trial and suffering the American 
patriots under the leadership of the immortal Washington, 
struggled for a free existence. At times the fortunes of the 
colonies were at so low an ebb, that the great leader himself 
almost despaired of final triumph, and contemplating a pos- 
sibility of failure had determined to rally around him those who 
preferred death to submission, retreat to the fastnesses of the 
mountains in the interior, and there maintain a desperate strug- 
gle for liberty until the end. But the God of battles had willed 
it otherwise, the darkness of the storm was followed by the 
bursting light of the day of freedom, and the nation nursed in 
a cradle of blood and war for seven years after its birth, sprung 
into manhood in the triumph of victory in 1773. 

And now one hundred years have passed. We had our trials 
and troubles, wars, foreign and domestic, but the Providence 
that so tenderly watched over us in our infancy has not neglected 
us in our prime. To-day the Eepublic is at peace with all the 
world, our flag respected at home and abroad, our people pros- 
perous and happy, and our example already liberalizing those 
very governments which looked with horror and dread at the 
growth of free institutions. And when another century rolls 
around, may future generations be as devoted to these great 
principles of freedom, and as determined to maintain them as 
the generations that have passed. And in 1976, as now, may 
the star spangled banner in triumph still wave, " o'er the land 
of the free and the home of the brave." 

I accept in the name of the Commissioners of Harlem Park 
this beautiful flag, and assure you upon their part that it shall 
be cherished as it deserves. And when hereafter it floats from 
your tall staff, may the mothers of Baltimore, pointing their 
children to its gorgeous folds, teach them to love, honor and 
revere that starry banner, as the proud emblem of this great 
Eepublic ! 



A CENTENNIAL RETROSPECT. 

A POEM BY DR. FRED. A. PALMER, OF MONTMORENCI, S. C. 

DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION, AIKEN, S. C, JULY 

4th, 1876. 

A noble band of patriots with faces all aglow 
Stood in the Halls of Congress one hundred years ago ; 
Stood side by side, as they had stood upoD the battle-field, 
When they compelled the troops of England's King to yield. 

The enemies of Liberty sat silent, pale and still 
While these brave men prayed God to know and do his will ; 
It was an hour when Justice was trembling in the scales, 
When God from man the future in tender mercy veils. 

These brave men knew that they must act for children yet un- 
born, 

They sealed the Nation's destiny upon that glorious morn, 

When each man pledged his all for Right, for Liberty and 
Peace, 

Forever sacred to our hearts shall be such men as these. 

'Tis true they left a stain upon our banner fold, 

But we have wiped it out with blood and paid for it in gold ; 

These patriots fought for Liberty, and pledged themselves to 

stand 
For Freedom, Right, and Justice, a firm unbroken band. 

But while they threw their own chains off, they bound in bonds 

more strong 
The bands that held the colored man in misery and wrong ; 
But soon or late all wrong comes right, for such is God's 

decree, 
And in His own good time He set the black man free. 

It was not some one favored State, North, South, East or West, 



238 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

That gave the true brave signers of that Declaration blest ; 
No ; each State gave her patriots who bore their noble share, 
And when the Nation's work was done, each State had proud 
names there. 

Let us clasp hands, to work as one, for all the Nation's good 
And stand together as one man, as once our fathers stood ; 
Behold, how short the time has been, but one brief hundred 

years, 
To plant the tree of Liberty and water it with tears. 

Brave men have fallen on the field, to guard that sacred tree, 
To save it from all vandal hands our aim shall ever be ; 
Altho' we still have many faults, our Nation yet is young ; 
And we will carry out the work which these brave men begun. 

We live in freedom ; let us clasp each other by the hand ; 
In love and unity abide, a firm, unbroken band ; 
We cannot live divided ; the Union is secure ; 
God grant that while men live and love this Nation may 
endure. 



ADDKESS. 

BY HON. P. C. CHENEY, GOV. OF N. IT., AND PRESIDENT 
OF THE DAY. 

AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION, AT MANCHESTER N. H., JULY 4, 1816. 

Fellow-citizens, ladies and gentlemen — We meet here to-day 
to recall the memories of the past, to hallow the acts and deeds 
of our fathers, to pay our tribute of love and grateful remem- 
brance to the heroic dead, who, one hundred years ago, bravely 
met the duties of the hour and in convention declared that 
these united colonies are, and of right, ought to be free and 
independent States, and in support of which solemnly pledged 
to each other their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor. 
We meet here too to note the rapid progress in art and science, 
the triumphant and onward march of civil and religious liberty : 
but what is most important of all, my fellow-citizens, we are 
here to consider how great is the responsibility which rests upon 
us, the children of this blessed inheritence, to which has been 
committed the truths that were purchased and paid for in the 
sacrifice of lives and fortunes of men whose inspirations were 
from on high and whose actions were crowned with more than 
human success. The experience of this generation has led us 
of the people to comprehend how great and how serious is the 
charge with which we are entrusted. Yes; bitter experience 
has taught us if we would preserve these blessings unimpaired, 
we must keep our hearts filled with love towards one anoth- 
er, and we can move forward with malice towards none and 
charity for all. But I don't propose to occupy your time; I 
take pleasure in introducing to you a man whose name is a 
guarantee that it will be a pleasure to listen to. 

Mr. B. F. Dame will now read the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence. 



THE DESTINY OF THE REPUBLIC. 

AN ORATION BY HON. LEWIS W. CLARK. 

delivered at the centennial celebration, manchester, n. h., 
july 4th, 1876. 

An inspired writer hath said, " To everything there is a sea- 
son, and a time to every purpose under the heaven." It is well 
to remember, as the years wear away, the anniversary of one's 
birth to union, as that advancing age is bringing us nearer to 
" that bourne from whence no traveler returns." It is well to 
keep in memory the valor, the sacrifices and the patriotism of 
those who fought and fell at Lexington and Bunker Hill in the 
great struggle for liberty, by a proper observance of the annual 
return of the 19th of April and the 17th of June. If it is well 
to observe the anniversary of these events, how much more 
appropriate to observe this day — the birth-day of a nation — and 
that nation ours ; the anniversary of the birth of that govern- 
ment which not only declares that all are born free and equal, 
but affords to all equal rights, and affords to all equal protec- 
tion in the enjoyment of those rights, without regard to age, 
sex, color or condition in life. 

We are assembled here to celebrate by appropriate exercises 
the one hundredth anniversary of American independence, and 
it is good that we should be here. Auspicious day ! ever memo- 
rable in the history of the world and in the annals of civiliza- 
tion. We have no need to build tabernacles to commemorate 
this event. They are already built, — founded by the patriotism 
of our fathers, — erected on soil drenched with the blood which 
has made every battle field of the revolution from Lexington to 
Yorktown memorable, and sustained by that unfaltering faitb in 
free institutions, and that love of civil and religious liberty that 
inspired our forefathers at Delft Haven, starting on their peril- 
ous voyage on the Mayflower ; at Plymouth Rock ; amid the 



ADDRESS LEWIS W. CLARK. 241 

snow of mid winter at Valley Forge, when, witli frozen feet, 
starving stomachs, and scantily clad bodies, under the leader- 
ship of Washington and his noble compeers, all sufferings were 
endured, obstacles overcome, and finally, at the cost of blood, 
privation and life, the right for us to assemble here to-day in 
peace was secured. Blessed be the memory of those who, at 
so great a sacrifice, purchased these blessings for us ! Fortu- 
nate will it be for our children's children if we have the virtue 
and wisdom to transmit to them unimpaired the glorious heri- 
tage bequeathed to us by onr fathers. 

A century! It extends beyond the period of the life of man, 
and yet it comprises but the infancy of a nation. "What changes 
have been wrought, aud what a multitude of marvellous events 
have been crowded into that period of time ! Not one of all 
this vast assemblage saw the sunlight of heaven on the 4th of 
July, 1776 ; and not one of us here to-day will participate in 
the exercises of the next centennial. 

One hundred years ago to-day at Philadelphia, in Independ- 
ence Hall, or rather on the steps of the Hall, at two o'clock in 
the afternoon was published to the world the Declaration of our 
national Independence, framed by Thomas Jefferson. And when, 
after the terrible struggle of the Revolution had secured the ac- 
knowledgment of that independence among the nations of the 
earth, a constitution was framed and submitted to the people of 
all the States for adoption, it was the vote of New Hampshire, 
given in convention, June 21, 1788, which secured the requisite 
number of States (a two-thirds) as required by the Constitution, 
and it became the Constitution of the United States of America 
which formed the Union of the States which exists to-day, and 
which we trust will continue to exist through all the ages to 
come. 

In the contest for freedom New Hampshire was among the 
foremost, and we may well to-day have a just pride in the names 
of Stark, Poor, Goffe, and Sullivan, and all those who stood 
shoulder to shoulder during those trying years of the infant re- 
public. We revere their memories. The hero of Bennington 
sleeps on the banks of our beautiful river. His body may turn 
to dust again, " old time with his chisel small " may consume the 



242 OUR NATIONAL JIIULEE. 

unassuming granit shaft that marks his last resting place, but 
the name of Stark will be remembered as long as the waters of 
the Merrimack flow by his grave to the sea. 

It is proper, after the lapse of a century, upon looking over the 
events of the past, to inquire what progress has been made. As 
a nation we have, from a comparatively small population, in- 
creased to forty-four millions of people ; schools and churches 
all over the land ; a great advancement has been made in art and 
in science ; we have the telegraph, the railroad, the steamboat, 
vast improvement in machinery of all kinds, wonderful inven- 
tions for the saving of human labor which were unknown one 
hundred years ago. Then, where our city now stands, was but 
a sparce population — a few scattered farm-houses, and the vast 
waterpower of the Merrimack was undeveloped ; to-day we have 
a beautiful city, with a population of thirty thousand people, 
with superior educational and religious advantages, and the hum 
of machinery and the sound of busy labor are continually to be 
heard. 

But after all these seeming evidences of prosperity and im- 
provement, has there been any real advancement in our civiliza- 
tion of a higher type? Are the people more intelligent and 
virtuous? Is there more honesty in public men, in the adminis- 
tration of the various departments of the government, and pub- 
lic justice in the execution of the laws ? And are the people 
more obedient to them than they were one hundred years ago ? 
If not, where is the progress and improvement ? 

But yet, let us hope that we have made some advance ; and 
that the world is better for the existance of the American nation 
during the century just closed. 

And now, as we look forward to the future, and enter upon an- 
other century of our national existence, let us profit by the ex- 
perience of the past, that we may avoid a recurrence of the diffi- 
culties and conflicts through which we have passed. 

In a faithful obedience to the requirements of the constitu- 
tion lies our only hope of safety for the perpetuity of our insti- 
tution. 

Equal rights to all, means equal rights to each State, to 
each community, and to each citizen ; and no State, com- 



ADDRESS — LEWIS W. CI, ARK. 243 

munity or individual has a right, under the constitution, to 
trespass upon or abridge the rights of any other. Can this 
Union long exist when the people of one State shall attempt to 
interfere with and control the people of another State, in viola- 
tion of the constitution ? Can it long exist when the majority 
shall attempt to disregard entirely all the rights of the minor- 
ity ? Does it tend to the maintenance of the constitution and 
the preservation of the Union, that honest and capable public 
officers shall be set aside for a conscientious discharge of a pub- 
lic duty, to give place to others who will, perhaps, be the pliant 
tools of a particular faction or a particular party ? or that one 
man shall be allowed to control the right of suffrage of another? 
or that the right of suffrage shall be sold like merchandise in 
the market? These evils if they exist, are contrary to the in- 
stitutions founded by the fathers, and let every citizen in the 
State and nation aim to secure the purity of the ballot, and a 
faithful and impartial administration of the government, the 
constitution and the laws. Then the stars shall not fade from 
our glorious flag as the words of the declaration of independ- 
ence have faded upon the parchment, nor shall its folds trail in 
the dust, but it shall continue to float as the emblem of our na- 
tional sovereignty, protecting every American citizen over whom 
it floats, in every land, and on every sea. 

Let us hope and believe that this shall be the destiny of the 
Republic, and with nobler aims and a more exalted patriotism, 
endeavor to discharge our duties as citizens, then we can say 
in the beautiful words of Longfellow — 

" Thou, too, sail on, O ship of State. 
Sail on, O Union, strong and great. 
Humanity, with all its fears, 
With all its hopes of future years, 
Is hanging hreathless on thy fate. 
We know what master laid thy keel, 
What workmen wrought thy ribs of steel 5 
Who made each mast, and sail, and rope, 
What anvils rang, what hammers beat, 
In what a forge and what a heat 
Were shaped the anchors of thy hope. 
Fear not each .sudden sound and shock, 
'Tis of the wave and not the rock ; 
'Tis but the flapping of a sail, 
And not a rent made, by the gale. 



244 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

In spite of rock antl tempest's roar, 
Iu spite of false lights on the shore- 
Sail on ! nor fear to breast the sea ; 
Our hearts, our hopes are all with thee, 
Our hearts, our hopos, our prayers, our tears — 
Our faith triumphant o'er our fears — 
Are all with thee, are all with thee I 



THE FIRST CENTURY OF THE REPUBLIC. 

AN" ADDRESS BY JUDGE ISAAC W. SMITH. 

DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION AT MANCHESTER, N. H., 
JULY 4th, 1876. 

My Fellow Countrymen : Our republic has reached a halting 
place in the grand march of nations, where the wheels of time 
seem for a moment to stop ere they commence again to turn in 
the perpetual circuit of the centuries. We pause this day in 
our journey as a nation to look back upon the past and gird 
ourselves anew for still further upward progress. 

Shall we glance at the heroic age of New England, the event- 
ful story of the Puritans? They were indeed burning and 
sinning lights amid persecution, sealing with their lives their 
faith in an over-ruling God. At Delfthaven they knelt on the 
seashore, commending themselves with fervent prayer to the 
protection of heaven : friends, home, native land, they left behind 
them forever, and encountered the dangers of unknown seas 
in search of a place where they might worship the living God 
according to the dictates of conscience. 

We admire the firm faith in which they met the horrors of 
Indian warfare, the privations of cold, disease and death, 
" lamenting that they did not five to see the glories of the faith- 
ful." The story of the Mayflower and Plymouth Rock, of 
heros more noble than Greek or Roman, of conflicts more sub- 
lime and victories more important than any recorded in history 
— is it not written in our hearts ? And do we not contemplate 
this day with affectionate remembrance the debt of gratitude 
we owe to the men and women who laid so broad and deep the 
foundations of civic and religious liberty ? 

This day, the joyful shout "America is free!" spreads from 
state to state, from city to city, from house to house, till the 
whole land rings with the glad voice, and echo upon echo comes 
back from every mountain and hill-side, " America is free !" On 



2IG OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

our mountains and on the great plains of the West, forty mil- 
lions of voices unite in sending from the shores of the Atlantic 
to those of the Pacific the songs of freedom. Shady groves 
resound with the merry voices of innocent children. Busy 
streets are tilled with throngs of freemen. Eloquence portrays 
with glowing tongue and burning lips those struggles and 
triumphs in which the nation was born, and to-day stands forth 
a mighty one in the great family of governments. The early 
dawn was ushered in with ringing of bells and every demon- 
stration of joy. It is celebrated by every class, society and 
organization, by civic processions, floral gatherings, orations, 
military reviews, each and all with the joy and enthusiasm 
whicl Americans only can feel. The going down of the sun 
will be the signal for the gathering of thousands upon thou- 
sands to Close the festivities of the day amid the blazing of 
rockets and the glittering of fireworks, rivaling the stars in 
splendor and beauty. 

We to-day look back through a period of one hundred years 
upon the men in congress assembled who proclaimed thirteen 
infant colonies a free and independent nation. Lexington, and 
Concord, and Bunker Hill had demonstrated that men could 
fight, and men could die in defence of liberty. The illustrious 
men who composed that memorable congress, in support of the 
Declaration of Independence ; " pledged their lives, their for- 
tunes, their sacred honors" — their all Lives and fortunes were 
sacrificed in its defence but not honor. 

Scarcely three millions of people were scattered along the 
Atlantic coast from New Hampshire to Georgia — a narrow 
fringe of settlements hardly extending beyond the Alleghanies ; 
while beyond the vast expanse of this mighty continent was an 
unknown wilderness — the abode of savages ready to press 
down upon the unguarded settlements with the arrow and tom- 
ahawk. Through seven long years war raged throughout the 
land. Men of the same blood and language faced each other 
in hostile array. 

But darkness and doubts at length passed away, and day 
dawned upon the long night of the revolution. The roll of 
musketry and the clash of arms were hushed. To-day we have 



addrb:ss — JUDGE ISAAC W. SMITH. 247 

become a nation of forty-four millions. Westward tbc star of 
empire has taken its way, till cities mighty and influential have 
risen, flourishing on either seaboard and on the vast plains 
through which the " fathers of Waters " cuts his way from 
the Great Lakes of the North to the Gulf that washes our 
Southern borders. " The busy town, the rural cottage, the 
lowing herd, the cheerful hearth, the village school, the rising 
spire, the solemn bell, the voice of prayer, and the hymn of 
praise, brighten and adorn American life and privileges.'' 

What mighty changes have these one hundred years wit- 
nessed ! The seed of liberty sown by our fathers has ger- 
minated and nourished even in the monarchies of Europe. 
Napoleon made all tremble with his hostile legions. Forty 
centuries looked down on his conquering armies from the 
pyramids of Egypt. France, the scene of so many revolutions, 
has become enrolled in the list of republics. Other nations, 
catching the shouts of freemen, have compelled the loosening 
of the reins of power. Thrones that have stood firmly for ages 
have been made to tremble upon their foundations. Austria, 
the laud of tyranny and oppression, has compelled her emperor 
to abdicate. The Pope, whose election was hailed by the 
whole civilized world as the harbinger of a better administra- 
tion, was hardly seated upon his throne before he fled in dis- 
guise from his pontifical halls, and St. Peter's and the Vatican 
resounded with the triumphal shouts of an awakened nation. 
Hungary struggled for independence as a nation, and practi- 
cally achieved it, so that to-day it lives under laws enacted by 
its own parliament, and accepts the emperor of Austria as king. 
Russia has emancipated her serfs and taken vast strides in her 
progress as a nation. China is no longer a walled nation, shut 
up from the rest of the world. With Japan she has opened 
her gates to the commerce of the world, and civilization has 
began to loosen the scales from the eyes of hundreds of mil- 
lions of people in these two nations, whose origin as well as 
their knowledge is the arts and sciences, is lost in the dim ages 
of antiquity. 

On the Western Continent we have in the war of 1812-15 as- 
serted our right against England to travel the highways of the 



248 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

seas unmolested. The Saxons have conquered and dismember- 
ed Mexico. The most gigantic rebellion the world ever saw has 
been suppressed, and with it fell the institution of shivery. 
That foul blot upon the otherwise fair face of our constitution, 
less than a score of years ago seemed firmly and irreversibly 
fastened upon the body politic. So steadily was it entrenched 
behind constitutional guaranties that there seemed no way by 
which it could be cured ; and hence it was endured. But God 
in his mysterious providence permitted those whose rights were 
thus protected by constitutional guaranties, to make war upon 
the government which protected them, and in the fratricidal 
struggle the shackles fell from the limbs of every slave. To-day 
the sun does not shine in all this mighty republic upon a single 
bondman. The same constitution and the same laws alike de- 
clare the equality of all men before the law without reference to 
previous condition of servitude, race or color. 

In the physical world, the progress in the arts and sciences 
has surpassed any conception which we were able to form. Cali- 
fornia outshines the wealth of India. We traverse the ocean in 
ships propelled by steam. The vast expanse of our land is 
covered by a network of iron rails reaching out in every direc- 
tion. The hourly rate of speed has increased from five miles to 
thirty, and even to sixty. The world has been girdled with the 
electric wire. It reposes in safety on the bed of the great deep. 
On the wings of the lightning it conveys from land to land and 
shore to shore every moment the intelligence of man's thoughts 
and man's actions. Each new year has opened up some new 
improvement or discovery in the world of inventions, which 
time fails me even to enumerate. And who shall say that a 
century hence the historian of that day will not be called upon 
to record the further discovery of wonders far surpassing any 
conception which we are able to form ? 

I should hardly be excused if I failed to mention our advance 
as a nation in the cause of education, but a glance only must 
suffice. 

The men who settled New England had been schooled in ad- 
versity. They had a true estimate of human greatness and 
human power. They knew that knowledge is power. As last 



ADDRESS — JUDGE ISAAC W. SMITH. 249 

as tlie forest was cleared the scliool was established. With, the 
establishment of the common school system have come self re- 
liance, intelligence, enterprise, till our sails whiten every sea, 
our commerce extends to the most distant ports, our fabrics 
complete successful with those of more favored lands ; our 
glorious Union itself has withstood the assaults of foes without, 
and traitors within, and stands immovably founded upon the 
intelligence and wisdom of the people. Csesar was the hero of 
three hundred battles, the conqueror of three millions of people, 
one million of whom he slew in battle. 15ut long after the in- 
fluence of his deeds shall have ceased to be felt, will the wisdom 
of our fathers, through the schools and colleges of our land, 
move the unnumbered masses that shall come after us. 

The foundation of prosperity is in an enlightened community. 
An ignorant people, though inheriting the most favored land on 
earth, soon sinks into insigni licence. Our extended seacoast 
invites commerce with every clime. Our fertile valleys and pra- 
ries bring forth the fruits of the earth hi rich abundance. Her 
numerous waterfalls and rivers have been harnessed to wheels 
that turn thousands and tens of thousands of spindles. Cities 
have sprung up hke exhalations under the magic touch of the 
magician's wand, and the hum of machinery rises out of the 
midst of a thrifty, industrious and happy people. The majestic 
plains and rivers of the West have collected adventurers from 
every pari of the world. The country to-day exhibits to other 
nations the unexampled rise and prosperity of a free, self- 
governed and educated people. To the wisdom of our fathers 
we are indebted for this rich legacy. With what care should 
we cherish our institutions of learning, that those who come 
after us may have reason to bless their fathers as we bless ours. 

Happily our fathers did not attempt the union of the church 
and state. It was no mercenary motive that led them to leave 
old England's shores. Theirs was a strong and enduring love 
of God, a perfect faith in his promises ; accordingly they hesi- 
tated not to sever the ties of kindred and nation, to find in the 
unbroken wilderness of New England a place to worship God 
" according to the dictates of their own consciences." It docs 
not excite our wonder, but our admiration — that every infant 



250 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

settlement had its sanctuary — the ten thousand church spires 
reaching upward toward heaven point with unerring accuracy 
to the source of our prosperity as a nation. Centuries to come 
will approve and applaud our fathers who worshipped in square 
pews, and the ministers who preached with subduing power 
from high pulpits. 

Such was the first century of the Republic. It has been one 
of struggle, but one of prosperity. Upon us and our children 
devolves the privilege and duty of carrying the nation forward 
to still greater prosperity. Shall we be behind our fathers 
in declaring for intelligence as against ignorance ; for honesty 
and ability in our rulers ; and for religion against irreligion ? 
Our backward look should be but an inspiration to future pro- 
gress. As we stand to-day, in the presence of the fathers of 
the republic, may we receive, as men receive life from God, the 
inspiration which animated them to do and to die. 

" Thanks be to God alone 
That oat whole land is one. 

As at her birth I 
Echo the grand refrain, 
From rocky peak to main, 
That rent is every chain, 

From south to north." 



THE PERPETUITY OF THE REPUBLIC. 

AN ADDRESS BY JOSEPH KIDDER, ESQ , 
DELIVERED AT MANCHESTER, N. H., JULY 4tH, 1876. 

Mix. President, Ladies and Gentlemen : — I will say to you 
that I shall keep you but a very brief space of time. It is 
natural for any people, on so great a day as the celebration 
of the one hundredth anniversary of the nation's existence, to 
dwell largely upon reminiscences of the past, and glorify those 
whose fortune it was to shape the government that came into 
being through their agency. Especially is this true where 
national existence has proved to be in a particular sense a 
national blessing. Under such circumstances it would not be 
wise to check the outburst of patriotic hearts, or restrain in 
narrow compass the national joy that finds expression in any 
national form of jubilation. Hence this day, which rounds the 
full period of one hundred years in the history of the Republic, 
millions of happy people celebrate the deeds of honored fathers, 
and enjoy the blessings of a government to which history fur- 
nishes the world no parallel. Truly it is a day of which we may 
well be proud, and poets and orators may exhaust the English 
language in speaking words of praise on this memorable event. 
But while we rejoice that the events of the century have cul- 
minated in this grand work of human progress and freedom ; 
and while we congratulate ourselves on our escape from the 
numerous perils along the pathway of the Republic, we are ad- 
monished that the past alone is no guarantee for the future. 
True it is that history cannot be recalled. It stands immutable 
as the rocks of the granite State. No fiat of power, no scheme 
of human ingenuity, can recall it. Call as we will, or lament as 
we may, there it is, written or unwritten, and it helps to con- 
tribute to the record of generations passed forever from the 
face of the earth. It is for us w T ho live to treasure in our hearts 



252 OUB NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

the letters written for our instruction, and press forward to tlie 
future with earnest endeavors to increase the sum of human 
happiness in every proper way. In view of these sentiments 
we might well ask if we are assured that it is a fact that coming 
years will find the people of America still in possession of the 
enlightened government and the social and moral comforts that 
are now the glory of her people. 

Do our hearts all exult in firm faith that the ship of state 
shall sail on over the unseen sea that heaves with calm and steady 
How, or do they deem the shadows that here and there obscure 
the horizon proclaim that rocks and whirlpools and storms may 
sooner or later send her down to untold depths with all the 
precious freight of human souls on board ? 

On such a day as this I would not check the festivities of the 
hour, or cause a shadow to rest like a pall upon a single he :rt, 
but wisdom admonishes us that those only are wise who discern 
the evil in the distance and adopt measures to resist her fatal 
advauces. Our Government was founded in patriotism and in 
a spirit of religious trust. It was not a venture depending upon 
chance for success or failure, but on the deep and earnest con- 
viction of men. 

With firm reliance upon a divine providence for successful 
preservation in the hazardous enterprise in which they were 
about to engage, no step did they take or measure did they in- 
augurate without assuring themselves that the God of political 
freedom would crown their efforts with the divine approbation. 
And in this connection it might be proper to say that notwith- 
standing the perils of the past, there are some things upon which 
the continued peace and prosperity of our government must 
depend. Many of these I would discuss if I had time. I mighl 
speak of the school system of our country and the advantages 
which education would bring to us ; also of patriotism, without 
which no people shall ever hold existence for any period of 
time. I might also allude to the purity of the ballot as abso- 
lutely essential to free and successful reform. I might also al- 
lude to that Christian integrity without which all onward pro- 
gress is impossible. But these things I pass. I congratulate 
the multitude here assembled to-day on the future prospect of 



ADDRESS — JOSEPH KIDDER. 253 

our country. The skies are bright ; prosperity is cheering ; 
and I believe that, while occasionally we have doubt and fear, 
occasionally look upon the dark side of life ; yet I firmly believe 
that the perpetuity of this government is fixed and established 
so that it cannot be overturned, and so that, if we are true to 
the application of the principles on which onr fathers founded 
these United States, we shall continue to be the bulwark of free- 
dom. 



THE YEAR OF JUBILEE. 

A POEM, BY CLARA B. HEATH. 

READ BY JOSEPH KIDDER, ESQ., AT MANCHESTER N. H., 

JULY 4th, 1876. 

Let us turn o'er this golden day, 

When even sober fancies play, 

And weary hearts forget what grieves. 

Our Country's book — its hundred leaves. 

A hundred leaves ! a hundred years ! 

How strange the opening page appears ! 

A mighty nation then had birth, 

Whose name was heard in all the earth, 

Pre-eminent among the free, 

The sacred home of Liberty. 

God's blessing brought her wealth and fame, 

While honors clustered round her name. 

To-day that nation greeting sends, 
To all who are the nation's friends ; — 
Triumphant song her bosom stirs, 
Glad tidings of great joy are hers ; 
A queen she sits in glory dressed, — 
Rejoice with her, for she is blest. 
Her grateful children far and near, 
Will hold this day in memory dear ; 
While thousands more her colors wear, 
And thank her for her fostering care. 
Let banners wave, and bells be rung, 
And many a sweet " Te Deum" sung. 

This is her year of Jubilee, 

Which millions thrill with joy to see ; 

Attained through years of war and woe, 



A POEM — CLARA B. HEATH. 25o 

By many a hard and timely blow; 
But after wounds came healing balm, 
And after winds and waves a calm. 
The record of some noble deed. 
Illumines every page we read. 
Sometimes we start in glad surprise, 
Sometimes are mute with wondering eyes ; 
How manifold her blessings grown! 
No other land is like our own. 

Turn quick the pages darkly red 
With brother's blood, so madly shed ; 
To-day we pass them softly by, 
Without a tear ; without a sigh ; 
Not all in vain the lesson sent, 
And blood and treasure freely spent, — 
The foulest stain our banner bore, 
Thank God, will never shame us more, 
While North and South more wise appear, 
For these few leaves which cost so dear : 
We put them by like troubled dreams, — 
The present page with glory beams. 

We hear the wide Atlantic's roar, 
Or walk the far Pacific shore, 
Stand awed amid the northern snows, 
Or languid where the orange blows, 
Alaska's icy valley's thread, 
The arid plains of Utah tread, 
Or seek the western wilds so still, 
And drink of nature's cup our fill ; 
Kind, friendly hands our own will grasp, 
Our country holds us in her clasp, 
Extending far, from zone to zone, 
From sea to sea is all our own. 

Here, mid our grand New England hills ; 
Where beauty like the dew distills, 
From every cloud that floats between 



2',(i OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Her mountain tops, from every green 
Encircled lake, whose smiling face 
Wears year by year an added grace ; 
Where every stream is clear and bright, 
And wood and wave both charm the sight ; 
Our country's record grows more dear, 
With every swift, succeeding year. 
Her welfare nearer to the heart, 
Her honor of our life a part. 

How cool the Merrimack flows on! 
It seems to take a softened tone 
Beside the green and honored grave 
Of Stark, the patriot, true and brave. 
His fame is ours— his deeds shall tell 
How long our heroes fought, how well 
New Hampshire's sons, with noble grace, 
In history hold an honored place. 
Her soldiers were a faithful band, 
Her statesmen with the foremost stand ; 
And are at least, had fame world-wide — 
We point to Websters ; name with pride. 

Our future who but God can know, 

Yet all our skies with promise glow. 

" Our bulwarks are the hearts of men," 

And strong and true they beat as when, 

A hundred years ago, their sires 

Built up ths sacred altar fires. 

May wisdom be their future guide, 

With truth and love on either side, — 

With them what glorious things are wrought 

Without them labor brings us nought. 

May God uphold with mighty hand, 

And bless indeed this happy land. 



THE NATIONAL UTTERANCES AND ACHIEVE- 
MENTS OF OUR FIRST CENTQRY. 

AN ORATION BY PROF. JOHN MERCER LANGSTON, L.L.D. 

DELIVERED AT PORTSMOUTH, VIRGINIA, JULY 4th, 187(5. 

Mr. President of the Banneker Lyceum and Fellow-Citizens : 
I congratulate you upon the name which your association bears. 
In giving title to your association you honor one who largely 
unaided, by his own efforts distinguished himself as a scholar, 
while he made himself in no insignificant sense conspicuous as 
a philanthropist ; certainly so far as a free and bold advocacy of 
freedom for his own race discovered his love for mankind. 

Benjamin Banneker cultivated in his studies those matters of 
science which pertain to astronomical calculations ; and so 
thorough and exact were his calculations, as they respected the 
different aspects of the planets, the motions of the sun and 
moon, their risings and settings, and the courses of the bodies 
of planetary systems, as to excite and command the commenda- 
tion of Pitt, Fox, "Wilberforce, and other eminent men of his 
time. 

In 1791 Banneker sent to Thomas Jefferson, then President 
of the United States, a manuscript copy of his first almanac, en- 
closing it in a letter, in the closing portions of which he uses 
the following words : " Suffer me to recall to your mind that 
time, in which the arms of the British crown were exerted, with 
eveiy powerful effort, in order to reduce you to a state of servi- 
tude ; look back, I entreat you, on the variety of dangers to 
which you were exposed ; reflect on that period in which every 
human aid appeared unavailable, and in which even hope and 
fortitude wore the aspect of inability to the conflict, and you 
cannot but be led to a serious and grateful sense of your mira- 
culous and providential preservation ; you cannot but acknow- 
ledge that the present freedom and tranquillity which you enjoy 



258 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

you have mercifully received, and that it is the peculiar bless- 
ing of heaven. This, sir, was a time when you clearly saw into 
the injustice of a state of slavery, and in which you had just ap- 
prehensions of the horrors of its condition. It was then that 
your abhorrence thereof was so excited, that you publicly help 
forth this true and invaluable doctrine, which is worthy to be 
recorded and remembered in all succeeding ages : ' We hold 
these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal ; 
that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable 
rights, and that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of 
happiness.' 

" Here was a time in which your tender feelings for your- 
selves had engaged you thus to declare ; you were then im- 
pressed with proper ideas of the great violation of liberty, and 
the free possession of those blessings, to which you were entitled 
by nature ; but, sir, how pitiable is it to reflect, that although 
you were so fully convinced of the benevolence of the Father of 
mankind, and of His equal and impartial distribution of these 
rights and privileges which He hath conferred upon them, that 
you should at the same time counteract His mercies, in detain- 
ing by fraud and violence, so numerous a party of my brethren 
under groaning captivity and cruel oppression, that you should 
at the same time be found guilty of that most criminal act, 
which you professedly detested in others, with respect to your- 
selves." 

In a very few days after receiving this letter the President 
made the following reply : " Sir, I thank you sincerely for your 
letter, and the almanac it contained. Nobody wishes more than 
I do, to see such proofs as you exhibit, that nature has given to 
our black brethren talents equal to those of the other colors of 
men ; and that the appearance of a want of them, is owing mere- 
ly to the degraded condition of their existence, both in Africa 
and America. I can add with truth, that nobody wishes more 
ardently to see a good system commenced for raising their con- 
dition, both of their body and mind, to what it ought to be, as 
far as the imbecility of their present existence, and other circum- 
stances which cannot be neglected we'll admit. I have taken the 
liberty of sending your almanac to Monsieur de Condozett, Sec- 



ORATION PROP. JOHN MERCER LANGSTON. 259 

retary of the Acrdeiny of Science at Paris, and member of the 
Philanthropic Society, because I considered it as a document to 
which your whole color had a right for their justification, against 
the doubts which have been entertained of them.'' 

I make no apology for making this allusion, in this connec- 
tion, to the man whose memory you honor in the phraseology 
" Banneker Lyceum ;" nor for referring to his eminence us a 
scholar, and his bold advocacy in addressing even the author 
of the Declaration of American Independence, then President of 
the United States, in such words as to provoke the earnest and 
manly reply just presented. Let the colored American con- 
template with pride this brief but interesting chapter which 
brings the name of the scholarly negro Banneker, in such juxta- 
position to that of the eminent American statesman, Thomas 
Jefferson. 

I also congratulate you upon this vast assembly, brought to- 
gether under those instincts and promptings of patriotism, ad- 
miration and gratitude, with which from one end to the other 
of our country, from sea to sea, our fellow-countrymen meet this 
day, in hall, in church, like ourselves beneath the green foliage 
of God's own temple, to call to mind and note the magnificent 
utterances, the splendid achievements and marvelous progress 
of our nation made within the first hundred years of its exis- 
tence. 

On this occasion, I may not tarry to dwell upon the utter- 
ances of individuals, however eminent and distinguished. Tt is 
only of those great national utterances, those judgments of the 
nation itself, so expressed in that majestic and thrilling voice of 
a great people, that its echoes never die, that I may speak on this 
interesting and memorable day ; and of these in the briefest 
manner. 

On the4thday of July 1116, one hundred years ago, thirteen 
colonies with an insignificant population boldly made declaration 
of their independence of the British crown and their sovereign- 
ty as a free and independent nation, and to the maintenance of 
this declaration and their independence, with a firm reliance on 
the protection of Divine Providence, mutually pledged their lives, 
their fortunes, and their sacred honor. The annals of one hun- 



260 OtJH NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

dred years radiant with proofs of the sincerity of this pledge of 
our Fathers, attest how well, how manfully, how successfully, 
and triumphantly, our country has maintained herself among 
the great nations of the earth. 

Perhaps the history of the world furnishes no document in 
which individual equality, the first powers of government ; the 
conditions upon which a people may alter or abolish one govern- 
ment and institute another, laying its foundations and organiz- 
ing its powers in such form and upon such principles as to them 
shall seem most likelv to effect their safety and happiness, with 
such clearness and force, as our own declaration, the masterpiece 
of American State papers. Upon its very words, could we se- 
perate them from the sentiments and doctrines which they em- 
body we would dwell with a sort of superstitious pride and 
pleasure. But upon the doctrines, the principles, the senti- 
ments they contain, we dwell justly with veneration and grate- 
ful approval. How the school boy, the clergyman, the states- 
man, all classes with equal pride and emotion repeat the words 
" when in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for 
one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected 
them with another, and to assume among the powers of the 
earth, the seperate and equal station to which the laws of nature 
and of nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opin- 
ions of mankind, requires that they should declare the causes 
which impel them to the seperation. 

We hold these truths self-evident : that all men are created 
equal ; that they are endowed by their Creator with certain in- 
alienable rights ; that among these are life, liberty, and the pur- 
suit of happiness : that to secure these rights, governments are in- 
stituted among men deriving their just powers from the con- 
sent of the governed ; that whenever any form of government 
becomes destructive of these ends, it is the right of the people to 
alter or abolish it, and to institue a new government, laying its 
foundations on such principles, and organizing its powers in 
such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their safety 
and happiness." 

How often these words have been quoted on occasions like 
this, how thoroughly they have become a part of every Ameri- 



ORATION PROF. JOHN MERCER LANGSTON. 261 

can's very being - , inhaled with the moral atmosphere of every 
house, no one of us can tell. Nor is it material. It is enough 
for us to know that as they shape in their influence every act of 
our nation so they influence and determine largely the conscien- 
tious conviction and judgment of every elector of our country 
through whose vote our institutions are supported and main- 
tained. 

On the 10th clay of June, 1176, Congress appointed a commit- 
tee to prepare a declaration, that these colonies are of right and 
ought to be, free and independent states." 

This committee consisted of Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, 
Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, and Robert R. Livingston. 
As the declaration was presented by this committee in its original 
form, it contained among other charges against the King of 
Great Britain the following — " He has waged war against 
nations itself, violating its most sacred rights of life and liberty 
in the persons of a distant people, who never offended him, 
captivating and carrying them into slavery in another hemis- 
phere, or to incur miserable death in their transportation 
thither. This piratical warfare, the opprobrium of infidel 
powers, is the warfare of the Christian King of Great Britain, 
determined to keep open a market, where men should be 
bought and sold. He has prostituted his negative for suppress- 
ing every legislative attempt to prohibit or to restrain this 
execrable commerce, and that this assemblage of horrors might 
want no fact of distinguished die, he is now exciting those very 
people to rise in arms among us, and to purchase that liberty 
of which he has deprived them, by murdering the people on 
whom he also obtruded them : thus paying off former crimes 
committed against the liberties of one people, with crimes 
which he urges them to commit against the lives of another." 

This clause, formidable indeed in the charge presented, but far- 
reaching and significant in favor of the abolition of slavery was 
stricken from the declaration, on the suggestion of the state of 
Georgia. The declaration, however, as a whole is none the less 
emphatic in favor of the inalienability of man's right to life, 
liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, and Garrison, Phillips, 
Smith, Sumner, and their associates, the great apostles of the 



262 



OITH NATIONAL JUBILEE. 



American abolition movement did well to plead the cause of 
the slave, and to claim the equality of the rights of the negro 
before American law in the name of its principles and teachings. 

With regard to the courage and heroism, which distinguished 
the American soldier of our revolutionary period, and the 
triumphs which attended our armies, I need not speak, all are 
acquainted with these and to-day as we go back in memory to 
our-struggle at Lexington, at Bunker Hill, and to the surrender 
of Burgoyne, our souls are filled with gratitude that the God of 
battles brought victory to those arms wielded in a struggle for 
freedom, independence and free institutions. 

Eight years of conflict, brought us a victory which settled 
forever our independence and sovereignty, no longer a dream, 
but a solemn, abiding reality. 

I wish to bring to your attention and emphasize two things 
with regard to the articles of confederation, approved the 9th 
day of July, 1778, in the 3d year of the Independence of 
America. 1st. These articles are entitled articles of confedera- 
tion and perpetual union between the States of New Hampshire, 
Massachusetts Bay, &c, and in the concluding article thereof, 
the 2d clause contains these words, "and whereas it has 
pleased the great Governor of the world to incline the hearts 
of the Legislatures, we respectively represent in Congress, to 
approve of, and to authorize us to ratify the said articles of 
confederation and perpetual union : know ye, that we the un- 
dersigned delegates, by virtue of the power and authority to 
use given for that purpose, do, by these presents, in the name 
and in behalf of our respective constituents, fully and entirely 
ratify and confirm each and every of the said articles of con- 
federation and perpetual union, and all and singular the mat- 
ters and things therein contained ; and we do further solemnly 
plight and engage the faith of our respective constituents, that 
they shall abide by the determinations of the United States, in 
Congress assembled, on all questions which, by the said con- 
federation, are submitted to them ; and that the articles thereof 
shall be inviolably observed by the States we respectively 
represent ; and, that the union be perpetual. 

Although each State under these Articles retained its sover- 



ORATION PROF. JOHN MERCER LANGSTON. 263 

eignty, freedom and independence, and every power, jurisdiction 
and right not expressly delegated to the United States in Con- 
gress assembled thus forming as the articles of confederation 
import, simply a confederacy under the style of the * United 
States of America,' the union, formed thus was to be perpetual, 
lasting forever, as is abundantly shown from the words of this 
document already quoted. 

The union of these articles, a compact of sovereign States, was 
to be perpetual. It was not long, however, before the sovereignty 
of the States was merged, under the Constitution of the United 
States, in the higher and grander sovereignty of the nation. 
And thus our Union was made more perfect and perpetual. 
Let it stand forever ! 

Concerning the 4th Article of these Articles there is a matter 
of history which must prove especially interesting to all of us, 
when, now, our constitutional law has been so amended as to 
tolerate no discrimination with regard to citizenship predicated 
upon complexion. 

When this Article was under consideration a proposition was 
made to qualify the phrase " free inhabitants," occurring therein, 
by the insertion of the word " white," so as to make it read 
" free white inhabitants," etc. Upon due consideration, eleven 
States voting upon the proposition, it was lost — eight States 
voting against it, two States in favor of it, while the vote of one 
State was divided. Early thus in the history of our nation the 
fathers decided to allow no discrimination among our country, 
men as to citizenship based upon complexional differences, and 
nowhere either in the Declaration of Independence, or in the 
Articles of Confederation is the word white used except in the 
latter, it is found in the following connection, in Article 9th, 
" The United States in Congress assembled shall have authority 
among other things, to agree upon the number of land forces, 
and to make requisitions from eaeh State for its quota, in pro- 
portion to the number of white inhabitants in such State." 

"Why the word white is used in this connection, I am at a loss 
to know. It was not certainly because of the color of citizens of 
African descent. It was certainly not because they were not 
patriotic, brave, and enduring soldiers. In the revolutionary 



264 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

struggles they early demonstrated their fidelity and courage. 
One of the four first Americans falling, in the Boston massacre 
of 1770, being a mulatto, Crispus Attucks, whose name is one 
famous in the annals of that struggle. This word white was 
certainly not used to discriminate against citizens of African 
descent prejudicially as to the matter of citizenship. For gen- 
erally at this time, when emancipated, they became citizens and 
voters without qualification or condition in the States where 
they resided. The distinction made here then must have been 
in the interest of slavery, an institution which from the very 
first proved itself utterly at war with every interest of the 
people. 

Occupying, as we do this day, a high moral plain from which 
we may retrospect our past, we can appreciate the ordinance 
of 1787, which, establishing a form of government for our West- 
ern territories, concludes with sis Articles of compact between 
the original States and the people of the territories, the same to 
be unalterable, except by common consent. 

The first secures entire religious freedom, the second, trial hy 
jury, the writ of habeas corpus, together with other funda- 
mental rights usually inserted in Bills of Rights ; the third pro- 
vides for the encouragement and support of schools, and en- 
joins good faith towards the Indians ; the fourth places the 
new States to be formed out of the territory upon an equal foot- 
ing with the old ones ; the fifth authorizes the future division 
of the territory into not less than three nor more than five 
States, each to be admitted into the Uuion when it should con- 
tain 60,000 free inhabitants ; and the sixth contains the cele- 
brated anti-slavery proviso introduced by Jefferson, " That 
there shall be neither slavery nor involuntary servitude in any 
of the said States, other than in the punishment of crime, 
whereof the party shall have been duly convicted." 

Thousands of noble sons, inhabitants of the States formed of 
such territory, rejoice this day that no curse of slavery has 
blighted their toil — that no footsteps of the bondman ever 
pressed the pathway of their industry. The shouts of other 
millions, former slaves, uniting with those once their owners 
and masters, send back the echo of such rejoicing this day in a 



ORATION — HROF. JOHN MERCER LANGSTON. 265 

glad refrain of thanksgiving and joy, that no slave now breathes 
the air of our country. 

Chief among the moral triumphs of our age and country stands 
that act of our nation which emancipates four million of bonds- 
men ; and inducting them into the body-politic, throws over 
them the investiture of au equal and impartial citizenship. 

All honor is due him whose name is written first among the 
company of noble men, the chief work of whom, the glory of 
their endeavors, culminates in the emancipation of the American 
slave. All honor is due the great captain of our forces, who 
established through the sword, as the fixed law of our nation, 
the emancipation proclamation of the first day of January, 1863. 
Henceforth the names of Lincoln and Grant, are justly em- 
blazoned in our history as the emancipator and defender of our 
enslaved race. 

The Constitution of the United States, a document of rare, in 
many respects matchless, excellence, prior to its modification by 
the 13th, 14th and 15th Amendments, is now certainly without 
parallel in the history of mankind, as an enunciation of organic 
law ; and every American, whatever his political bias or party 
affihations, must experience special pleasure in knowing that 
no other nation of ancient or modern times has been given, 
the genius or the heart to produce such a document, and to 
establish in accordance there with a government which in its 
forms and results realizes so nearly our idea of that perfect 
government, the subjects of which, while they enjoy the amplest 
possible freedom, pursue their several occupations, assured of 
the largest protection to lite, liberty and property. 

As we read and study the great State papers of our nation — 
The Declaration of Independence, the Articles of Confederation, 
the Ordinance of 1187, and the Constitution of the United 
States — and consider the -workings of the Government organ- 
ized in accordance therewith, in none of its departments, dis- 
criminating against any of our citizens, native or naturalized, 
with regard to birthplace, nationality, complexion, or former 
condition of life, but inviting all to partake alike of the benefits 
and blessings of free institutions, our hearts swell with gratitude 
to that beneficient Dispenser of human affairs, who gave our 



206 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

fathers wisdom, courage, and success, and who has abundantly 
blessed their sons in national unity, prosperity and happiness. 

Of the material greatness of our country — its development of 
the great industries which distinguish its progress and civil- 
ization, I can do little more than make a passing allusion. Did 
I tarry to name simply our achievements in steam navigation, 
shipbuilding, the building of railroads, the manufacture of rail- 
road cars, improvements in all kinds of machinery, telegraphy, 
and printing, I would detain you beyond your patience and 
endurance. I content myself and trust I satisfy you by saying, 
the first century of our existence as a nation has witnessed such 
triumphs in art, science, and industry in our land as has not been 
vouchsafed in the history of mankind to any other people within 
such period. 

In all departments of business — in banking, commerce, agri- 
culture — we witness improvement of method, implement, and 
the use of power and skill. 

In politics, legislation and general reform, our national tri- 
umphs have been splendid; not less so, however, in the various 
departments of industry. 

Of our improvement in all those things that pertain to a well 
organized system of free common schools, supported by public 
tax, levied and collected by the general and cordial assent of 
property holders, I speak with pride. Generally our common 
school system is so valued, its good results so appreciated, that 
no considerations pecuniary or other would induce the people 
to consent to any reduction of taxes, or the doing of anything 
the tendency of which would be to curtail and destroy the in- 
fluence of such system. We all value the free common school 
as at present organized as indispensible to the education and 
training of the youth of all classes. Many without academic, 
or collegiate instruction, if not fully, measurably fitted for the 
pursuit of business or professional walks of life enter thereuj)on 
directly from our common schools and achieve therein commend- 
able success. Indeed, our common schools may ba properly 
enough regarded as the college of the people. No tuition may 
here be collected; no incidental fees charged; and yet, an edu- 
cation which furnishes excellent mental discipline, considerable 



ORATION — PROF. JOHN MERCER LANGSTON. 2G7 

knowledge, general and various, together with sound moral 
training may be secured. 

Of improvements in methods of instruction, buildings, furni- 
ture, apparatus, text-books, treatment of pupils, character of 
teachers, and modes of preparing teachers for their work, I can 
not speak in detail. Improvements in all these respects are 
abundant, transcending our most sanguine expectations, of the 
largest advantage and most satisfactory kind. 

Contrasting the system and condition of public instruction in 
France, Holland, Prussia, Germany, Great Britain and other 
countries with those of the United States of America, J. W. 
Hoyt, Esq., one of the Commissioners of the Paris Universal 
Exposition of 1SG7, in his report on education, under the title 
United States of America, says: 

" From the earliest settlement of this country by those brave 
men and women who landed on the rocks of Massachusetts 
Bay, no less imbued with the spirit of freedom and popular 
education than the love of God and liberty of conscience, the 
cause of education has been one of primary interest both to 
Colonial and Federal governments. A history of the sacrifices 
and toils by which were established and maintained the school- 
houses of the ante-revolutionary times of the Colonial period, 
and a summing up of the truly munificent contributions of the 
Federal and State authorities since the adoption of the ConstL 
tutional Government, to the great end of creating a citizenship 
worthy of our free institutions are sufficient to awaken the am- 
bition and enthusiasm of the dullest soul." 

Continuing, he says, " All in all, the original provisions of 
the government for the education of the people are more liberal 
than those of any other ; and in connection with the additions 
arising from regular taxation, and from appropriations made 
by the States themselves, present the most magnificent financial 
school basis of the world. The pride with which the American 
citizen regards this support of common-school instruction is 
amplified by contemplating the scarcely less abundant endow- 
ment by which individual wealth has built up the higher grades 
noticed under the head of Secondary Education." 

Upon the higher grades of education, the academies, colleges, 



208 



OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 



universities and professional schools, I may not dwell. The 
special character, claims and achievements of such schools we 
all appreciate. Their growth within the past fifty years has 
been marked, and through their instrumentality education has 
received decided impulse and noteworthy educational advan- 
tages have been gained. 

Fellow-citizens of Virginia, and by this appellation in this re- 
generated hour of American freedom I designate all classes 
and complexions, the class formerly masters, and that formerly 
slaves, I congratulate you upon the change in an educational 
point of view which has taken place in your own State during 
the past ten years. Instead of leaving your sons and daughters 
in ignorance, to a heritage of crime and degradation, you are 
establishing a common school system whose advantages and 
benefits will compensate in popular knowledge, wisdom, and 
virtue an hundred fold all labor, outlay and sacrifice connected 
therewith. To-day your schools, a double system, white and 
black, I trust the day is not distant when they will be one — a 
common school, stand open, and provision, if not yet ample and 
entirely satisfactory, has been made measurably for the accom- 
modation of the children of your State. Your people are show- 
ing already a wise appreciation of the advantages shown their 
children in your schools. And I but voice the feeling of your 
fellow-citizens throughout the country when I bid you a hearty 
God-speed in your noble work in this behalf. 

You may rest assured that in so far forth as any schools built 
and conducted in your State, upon northern liberality, shall 
hereafter need pecuniary assistance to support and maintain 
them in their special work, that assistance will not be wanting, 
when proper appeal is made for it. The people of the north, 
not more in New England than the great northwest, are 
deer>ly interested in the educational welfare of your humbler 
classes. 

But I must conclude. The progress of our nation during 
the past' one hundred years, in all those things which concern 
national greatness and glory is truly wondrous. In social, moral, 
and industrial growth she has no superior among the great 
nations of the earth. In statesmanship, jurisprudence, litera- 



ORATION — PROF. JOHN MERCER LANGSTON. 269 

ture, science, arts, and arms, she compares favorably with the 
foremost of these great nations. 

If her achievements and progress have been so great in the 
past, we may contemplate with confidence and pride her ad- 
vancement in the future. Remaining true to the lessons of 
freedom, equal rights, justice, humanity and religion taught us 
by the fathers, the wise men of our country, and the experience 
of the past, so fraught with warning and admonition, relying 
upon the God who has so signally blest her, our nation may 
hope to reach even a larger growth, to show a more splendid 
progress ; to attain a future more beautiful and magnificent 
than anything which distinguishes the century which this day 
closes the first hundred years of our national life. 



ADDEESS. 

BY GEN. JOHN A. DIX, EX-GOV. OF NEW YORE:, 
PRESIDENT OF THE DAY. 

DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION, AT THE ACADEMY OF 

music, n. y., july 4th, 1876. 

Fellow-citizens : — One hundred years ago to-day, in our 
sister city of Philadelphia, a band of courageous and devoted 
men, at the peril of their lives and everything they held dear, set 
at defiance one of the most powerful nations of Europe and pro- 
claimed to the world that the American Colonies, which they 
represented, were free and independent States, assuming for 
them " among the powers of the earth,'' to use their own lan- 
guage, " the separate and equal station to which the laws of na- 
ture and of nature's God entitle them." The three millions in 
whose behalf the Declaration of Independence was made are 
now more than forty millions, and wherever patriotic hearts are 
to be found— whether in the crowded thoroughfares of cities and 
towns or in the quietude of rural habitations — they are overflow- 
ing with gratitude for our prosperity, our good name among the 
nations, our free institutions, our widespread domain, never 
again to be pressed by a servile foot, and for our deliverance 
from the dangers through which we have passed ; above all, the 
late fearful peril of disunion. You will hear from eloquent 
lips the story of our trials and our triumphs, and of the fulfill- 
ment of that memorable prophecy uttered a century and a half 
ago of the progress of " the star of empire " westward. But 
first let us listen to the Eev. Dr. Adams, and join him in 
acknowledging our thankfulness to Almighty God for our 
preservation during the hundred years that are past, and in 
fervent supplication for His continued protection and favor 
through the years that are to come. 



EISE OF CONSTITUTIONAL LIBERTY. 

AN ORATION DELIVERED BY THE REV. DR. R. S, STORRS, 

AT THE ACADEMY OF MUSIC, NEW YORK, JULY 4, 187G. 

Mr. President — Fellow- Citizens : The long-expected day has 
come, and passing peacefully the impalpable line which separates 
ages, the Republic completes its hundreth year. The predictions 
in which affectionate hope gave inspiration to political prudence 
are fulfilled. The fears of the timid, and the hopes of those to 
whom our national existence is a menace, are alike disappointed. 
The fable of the physical world becomes the fact of the political ; 
and after alternate sunshine and storm, after heavings of the 
earth which only deepened its roots, and ineffectual blasts of 
lightning whose lurid threat died in the air, under a sky now 
raining on it benignant influence, the century-plant of American 
Independence and popular government bursts into this magnifi- 
cent blossom of a joyful celebration illuminating the land ! 

With what desiring though doubtful expectation those whose 
action we commemorate looked for the possible coming of this 
day, we know from the records which they have left. With what 
anxious solicitude the statesmen and the soldiers of the following 
generation anticipated the changes which might take place be- 
fore this Centennial year should be reached, we have heard our- 
selves, in their great and fervent admonitory words. How dim 
and drear the prospect seemed to our own hearts fifteen years 
since, when, on the fourth of July 1861, the XXXVHth Congress 
met at Washington with no representative in either House from 
any State south of Tennessee and Western Virginia, and when 
a determined and numerous army, under skillful commanders, 
approached and menaced the capital and the government — this 
we surely have not forgotten ; nor how, in the terrible years 
which followed, the blood and fire, and vapor of smoke, seemed 
oftentimes to swim as a sea, or to rise as a wall, between our 
eyes and this anniversary. 

"It cannot outlast the second generation from those who 
founded it/' was the exulting conviction of the many who loved 



272 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

the traditions and state of monarchy, and who felt them insecure 
before the widening fame in the world of our prosperous Re- 
public. "It may not reach its hundredth year," was the deep 
and sometimes the sharp apprehension of those who felt, as all 
of us felt, that their own liberty, welfare, hope, with the bright- 
est political promise of the world, were bound up with the unity 
and the life of our nation. Never was solicitude more intense, 
never was prayer to Almighty God more fervent and constant — 
not in the earliest beginnings of our history, when Indian feroci- 
ty threatened that history with a swift termination, not in the 
days of supremest trial amid the Revolution — than in those 
years when the nation seemed suddenly split asunder, and 
forces which had been combined for its creation were clenched 
and rocking back and forth in bloody grapple on the question 
of its maintenance. 

The prayer was heard. The effort and the sacrifice have 
come to their fruitage; and to-day the nation — still one, as at 
the start, though now expanded over such immense spaces, ab- 
sorbing such incessant and diverse elements from other lands, 
developing within it opinions so conflicting, interests so various, 
and forms of occupation so novel and manifold — to-day the na- 
tion, emerging from the toil and the turbulent strife, with the 
earlier and the later clouds alike swept out of its resplendent 
stellar arch, pauses from its work to remember and rejoice; with 
exhilarated spirit to anticipate its future; with reverent heart to 
offer to God its great Te Deum. 

Not here alone, in this great city, whose lines have gone out 
into all the earth, and whose superb progress in wealth, in cul- 
ture, and in civic renown, is itself the most illustrious token of 
the power and beneficence of that frame of government under 
which it has been realized; not alone in yonder, I had almost 
said adjoining, city, whence issued the paper that first an- 
nounced our national existence, and where now rises the mag- 
nificent Exposition, testifying for all progressive States to their 
respect and kindness toward us, the radiant clasp of diamond 
and opal on the girdle of the sympathies which interweave then- 
peoples with ours; not alone in Boston, the historic town, first 
in resistance to British aggression, and foremost in plans for 



ORATION REV. DR. E. S. STORRS. 273 

the new and popular organization, one of whose citizens wrote 
his name, as if cutting it with a plough-share, at the head of all 
on our great charter, another of whose citizens was its intrepid 
and powerful champion, aiding its passage through the Con- 
gress; not there alone, nor yet in other great cities of the land, 
but in smaller towns, in villages and hamlets, this day will be 
kept, a secular Sabbath, sacred alike to memory and to 
hope. 

Not only, indeed, where men are assembled, as we are here, 
will it be honored. The lonely and remote will have their part 
in this commemoration. Where the boatman follows the wind- 
ing stream, or the woodman explores the forest shades; where 
the miner lays down his eager drill beside rocks which guard 
the precious veins; or where the herdsman, along the sierras, 
looks forth on the seas which now reflect the rising day, which 
at our midnight shall be gleaming like gold in the setting sun 
— there also wiU the day be regarded, as- a day of memorial. 
The sailor on the sea will note it, and dress his ship in its 
brightest array of flags and bunting. Americans dwelling in 
foreign lands will note and keep it. 

London itself will to-day be more festive because of the event 
which a century ago shadowed its streets, incensed its Parlia- 
ment, and tore from the crown of its obstinate King the chiefest 
jewel. On the boulevards of Paris, in the streets of Berlin, and 
along the leveled bastions of Vienna, at Marseilles and at Flor- 
ence, upon the silent liquid ways of stately Venice, in the passes 
of the Alps, under the shadow of church and obelisk, palace 
and ruin, which still prolong the majesty of Eome ; yea, fur- 
ther East, on the Bosphorus, and in Syria ; in Egypt, which 
writes on the front of its compartment in the great Exhibition, 
" The oldest people of the world sends its morning- greeting to 
the youngest nation ;" along the heights behind Bombay, in the 
foreign hongs of Canton, in the " Islands of the Morning," 
which found the dawn of their new age in the startling sight of 
an American squadron entering their bays — everywhere will be 
those who have thought of this day, and who join with us to 
greet its coming. 

No other such anniversary, probably has attracted hitherto 



274 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

such general notice. You have seen Rome, perhaps, on one 
of those stringing April days when the traditional anniversary 
of the founding of the city fills its streets with civic processions, 
with military display, and the most elaborate fire- works in 
Europe ; you may have seen Holland, in 1782, when the whole 
country bloomed with orange on the three-hundredth anniver- 
sary of the capture by the sea-beggars of the city of Briel, and 
of the revolt against Spanish domination which thereupon 
flashed on different sides into sudden explosion. But these 
celebrations, and others like them, have been chiefly local. 
The world outside has taken no wide impression from them. 
This of ours is the first of which many lands, in different 
tongues, will have had report. Partly because the world is 
narrowed in our time, and its distant peoples are made neigh- 
bors, by the fleeter machineries now in use ; partly because we 
have drawn so many to our population from foreign lands, 
while the restless and acquisitive spirit of our people has made 
them at home on every shore ; but partly, also, and essentially, 
because of the nature and the relations of that event which we 
commemorate, and of the influence exerted by it on subsequent 
history, the attention of men is more or less challenged, in 
every centre of commerce and of thought, by this anniversary. 
Indeed it is not unnatural to feel — certainly it is not irrev- 
erent to feel — that they who by wisdom, by valor, and by 
sacrifice, have contributed to perfect and maintain the institu- 
tions which we possess, and have added by death as well as by 
life to the lustre of our history, must also have an interest in 
this day ; that in their timeless habitations they remember us 
beneath the lower circle of the heavens, are glad in our joy 
and share and lead our grateful praise. To a spirit alive with 
the memories of the time, and rejoicing in its presage of nobler 
futures, recalling the great, the beloved, the heroic, who have 
labored and joyfully died for its coming, it will not seem too fond 
an enthusiasm to feel that the air is quick with shapes we can- 
not see, and glows with faces whose light serene we may not 
catch ! They who counseled in the Cabinet, they who defined 
and settled the law in decisions of the Bench, they who pleaded 
with mighty eloquence in the Senate, they who poured out their 



ORATION — REV. DR. R. S. STORRS. 275 

souls in triumphant effusion for the liberty which they loved in 
forum or pulpit, they who gave their young and glorious life as 
an offering on the field, that government for the people, and by 
the people, might not perish from the earth — it cannot be but 
that they too have part and place in this Jubilee of our history ! 
God make our doings not unworthy of such spectators ! and 
make our spirit sympathetic with theirs from whom all selfish 
passion and pride have now forever passed away! 

The interest which is felt so distinctly and widely in this an- 
niversary reflects a light on the greatness of the action which it 
commemi >rai < s. It shows that we do not unduly exaggerate the 
significance or the importance of that; that it had really large, 
even world-wide rclations,and contributed an effective and a valu- 
able force to the furtherance of the cause of freedom, education, 
humane institutions, and popular advancement, wherever its in- 
fluence has been felt. 

Yet when we consider the action itself, it may easily seem but 
slight in its na' ure, as it was certainly commonplace in its cir- 
cumstances. There was nothing even picturesque in its sur- 
roundings, to enlist for it the pencil of the painter, or help 
to fix any luminous image of that which was done on the popu- 
lar memory. 

In this respect it is singularly contrasted with other great and 
kindred events in general history; with those heroic and fruit- 
ful actions iu English history which had especially prepared the 
way for it, and with which the thoughtful student of the past 
will always set it in intimate relations. Its utter simplicity, as 
compared with their splendor, becomes impressive. 

When, five centuries and a half before, on the fifteenth of 
June, and the following days, in the year of our Lord 1215, the 
English barons met King John in the long meadow of Eunne- 
mede, and forced from him the Magna Charta — the strong foun- 
dation and steadfast bulwark of English liberty, concerning 
which Mr. Hallam has said in our time that " ah which has been 
since obtained is little more than as confirmation or commen- 
tary," — no circumstance was wanting, of outward pageantry, to 
give dignity, brilliance, impressiveness, to the scene. On the 
one side was the King, with the Bishops and nobles who at- 



276 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

tended him, with the Master of the Templars, and the Papal 
legate before whom he had lately rendered his homage.* On 
the other side was the great and determined majority of the 
barons of England, with multitudes of knights, armed vassals, 
and retainers, f With them in purpose, and in resolute zeal, 
were most of those who attended the King. Stephen Langton, 
Archbishop of Canterbury, the head of the English clergy, was 
with them; the Bishops of London, "Winchester, Lincoln, Ro- 
chester, and of other great sees. The Earl of Pembroke, daunt- 
less and wise, of vast and increasing power in the realm, and 
not long after to be its Protector, was really at their head. 
Robert Fitz- Walter, whose fair daughter Matilda the profligate 
king had forcibly abducted, was Marshal of the army — the 
"Army of God, and the Holy Church." William Longsword, 
Earl of Salisbury, half-brother of the King, was on the field; 
the Earls of Albemarle, Arundel, Gloucester, Hereford, Norfolk. 
Oxford, the great Earl Warenne, who claimed the same right of 
the sword in his barony which William the Conqueror had had 
in the kingdom, the Constable of Scotland, Hubert de Burgh, 
seneschal of Poictou, and many other powerful nobles — de- 
scendants of the daring soldiers whose martial valor had mas- 
tered England, Crusaders who had followed Richard at Ascalon 
and at Jaffa, whose own liberties had since been in mortal peril. 
Some burgesses of London were present, as well; troubadours, 
minstrels, and heralds were not wanting; and doubtless there 
mingled with the throng those skillful clerks whose pens had 
drawn the great instrument of freedom, and whose training in 
language had given a remarkable precision to its exact clauses 
and cogent terms. 

Pennons and banners streamed at large, and spearheads 

* May 15, A.D. 1213. 

f " Quant a ceux qui se trouvaient du cote des barons, il n'est ni neces- 
saire ni possible de les 6numerer, puisque toute la noblesse d'Angletree 
reunie en un seul corps, ne pouvait tomber sous le calcul. Lorsque les 
pretentions desrevoltes eurent ete debattues, le roi Jean, comprenant son 
inferiorite vis-a-vis des forces de ses barons, accorda sans resistance les 
lois et libertes qu'on lui dernandait, et les confirma par la cbarte." 

Chronique de Matt. Paris, trad, par A. Huillard Breholles. Tome 
Troisieme, pp. 6, 7. 



ORATION BEV. DR. R. S. STORR8. 277 

gleamed, above the host. The June sunshine flashed reflected 
from inland shield and mascled armor. The terrible quivers of 
English yeomen hung on their shoulders. The voice of trum- 
pets, and clamoring bugles, was in the air. The whole scene 
was vast as a battle, though bright as a tournament ; splendid, 
but threatening, like burnished clouds, in which lightnings 
sleep. The king, one of the handsomest men of the time, 
though cruelty, perfidy, and every foul passion must have left 
their traces on his face, was especially fond of magnificence in 
dress ; wearing we are told, on one Christmas occasion, a rich 
mantle of red satin, embroidered with sapphires and pearls, a 
tunic of white damask, a girdle lustrous with precious stones, 
and a baldric from his shoulder, crossing his breast, set with 
diamonds and emeralds, while even his gloves, as indeed is still 
indicated on his fine effigy in Worcester cathedral, bore similar 
ornaments, the one a ruby, the other a sapphire. 

Whatever was superb, therefore, in that consummate age of 
royal and baronial state, whatever was splendid in the glitter- 
ing and grand apparatus of chivalry, whatever was impressive 
in the almost more than princely pomp of prelates of the 
Church, — 

The boast of heraldry, the pomp of power, 
And all that beauty, all that wealth can give,— 

all this was marshalled on that historic plain in Surrey, where 
John and the barons faced each other, where Saxon king and 
Saxon earl had met in council before the Norman had footing 
in England ; and all combined to give a fit magnificence of 
setting to the great charter there granted and sealed. 

The tower of Windsor — not of the present castle and palace, 
but of the earlier detached fortress which already crowned the 
cliff, and from which John had come to the field — looked down 
on the scene. On the one side, low hills enclosed the meadow ; 
on the other, the Thames flowed brightly by, seeking the 
capital and the sea. Every feature of the scene was English 
save one ; but over all loomed, in a portentous and haughty 
stillness, in the ominous presence of the envoy from Rome, that 
ubiquitous power surpassing all others, which already had once 
laid the kingdom under interdict, and had exiled John from 



278 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

church and throne, but to which later he had been reconciled, 
and on which he secretly relied to annul the charter which he 
was granting. 

The brilliant panorama illuminates the page which bears its 
story. It rises still as a vision before one, as he looks on the 
venerable parchment originals, preserved to our day in the 
British Museum. If it be true, as Hallam has said, that from 
that era a new soul was infused into the people of England, it 
must be confessed that the place, the day, and all the circum- 
stances of that new birth were fitting to the great and the vital 
event. 

That age passed away, and its peculiar splendor of aspect 
was not thereafter to be repeated. Yet when, four hundred 
years later, on the .seventh of June,* 1G28, the Petition of 
Right, the second great charter of the liberties of England, was 
presented by Parliament to Charles the First, the scene and its 
accessories were hardly less impressive. 

Into that law — called a Petition, as if to mask the deadly 
energy of its blow upon tyranny — had been collected by the 
skill of its framers all the heads of the despotic perogative 
which Charles had exercised, that they might all be smitten 
together, with one tremendous destroying stroke. The king, 
enthroned in his chair of state, looked forth on those who 
waited for bis word, as still he looks, with his fore-casting and 
melancholy face, from the canvas of Van Dyck. Before hini 
were assembled the nobles of England, in peaceful array, and 

* Calendar of State Papers, Domestic Series, Charles I., 1G28-9. 

Rushworth's Hist. Coll. Charles I. , 625. 

It is rather remarkable that neither Hume, Clarendon, Hallam, De 
Lolme, nor Macaulay, mentions this date, though all recognize the capi- 
tal import mce of the event. It does not appear in even Knight's Popu- 
lar History of England. Miss Aikin, in her Memoirs of the Court of 
Charles I., gives it as Jrme 8, [Vol. I, 216]; and Chambers' Encyclo- 
paedia, which ought to be careful and accurate in regard to the dates of 
events in English history, says, under the title " Petition of Rights: ' " At 
length, on both Houses of Parliament insisting on a fuller answer, he 
pronounced an unqualified assent in the usual form of words, ' Soi* fait 
comm-e il est desire, ' on the 26th of June, 1628.*' The same statement 
is repeated in the latest Revised Edition of that Encyclopaedia. Lingard 
gives the date correctly. 



ORATION REV. DR. R. S. STORRS. 279 

not in armor, but with a civil power in their Lands which the 
older gauntlets could not have held, and with the memories of 
a long renown almost as visible to themselves and to the king 
as were the tapestries suspended on the walls. 

Crowding the bar, behind these descendants of the earlier 
barons, were the members of the House of Commons, with 
whom the law now presented to the king had had its origin, 
and whose boldness and tenacity had constrained the peers, 
after vain endeavor to modify its provisions, to accept them as 
they stood. They were the most powerful body of represent- 
atives of the kingdom that had yet been convened ; possessing 
a private wealth it was estimated, surpassing three-fold that of 
the Peers, and representing not less than they the best life, and 
the oldest lineage, of the kingdom which they loved. 

Their dexterous, dauntless, and far-sighted sagacity is yet 
more evident as we look back than their wealth or their breed- 
ing ; and among them were men whose names will be familiar 
while England continues. Wentworth was there, soon to be 
the most dangerous of traitors of the cause of which he was 
then the champion, but who then appeared as resolute as ever 
to vindicate the ancient, lawful, and vital liberties of the king- 
dom ; and Pym was there, the unsurpassed statesman, who, 
not long afterward was to warn the dark and haughty apos- 
tate that he never again would leave pursuit of him so long as 
his head stood on his shoulders. 11 Hampden was there, con- 
siderate and serene, but inflexible as an oak ; once imprisoned 
already for his resistance to an unjust taxation, and ready 
again to suffer and to conquer in the same supreme cause. Sir 
John Eliot was there, eloquent and devoted, who had tasted 
also the bitterness of imprisonment, and who after years 
of its subsequent experience, was to die a martyr in the 
Tower. Coke was there, seventy-seven years of age, but full of 
lire as full of fame, whose vehement and unswerving hand had 
had chief part in framing the Petition. Selden was there, the 
repute of whose learning was already continental. Sir Francis 
Seymour, Sir Kobert Phillips, Strode, Hobart, Denzil Holies, 
and Valentine — such were the commoners ; and there, at the 

* Welwood's Memorials, quoted iu Forster's Life of Pym, p. 62. 






280 ODE NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

outset of a career not imagined by either, faced the king a 
silent young member who had come now to his first Parlia- 
ment at the age of twenty-nine, from the borough of Hunting- 
don, Oliver Cromwell. 

In a plain cloth suit he probably stood among his colleagues. 
But they were often splendid, and even sumptuous, in dress; 
with slashed doublets, and cloaks of velvet, with flowing collars 
of rich lace, the swords by their sides, in embroidered belts, 
with flashing hilts, their very huts jeweled and plumed, the 
abundant dressed and perfumed hair falling in curls upon their 
shoulders. Here and there may have been those who still more 
distinctly symbolized their spirit, with steel corslets, overlaid 
with lace and rich embroidery. 

So stood they in the presence, representing to the full the 
wealth, and genius, and stately civic pomp of England, until the 
king had pronounced his assent, in the express customary form, 
to the law which confirmed the popular liberties; and when, on 
hearing his unequivocal final assent, they burst into loud, even 
passionate acclamations of victorious joy, there had been from 
the first no scene more impressive in that venerable Hall, whose 
history went back to Edward the Confessor. 

In what sharp contrast with the rich ceremonial and the 
splendid accessories of these preceding kindred events, appears 
that modest scene at Philadelphia, from which we gratefully 
date to-day a hundred years of constant and prosperous na- 
tional life ! 

In a plain room, of an unpretending and recent building — the 
lower east room of what then was a State-house, what since has 
been known as the "Independence Hall" — in the midst of a 
city of perhaps thirty thousand inhabitants — a city which pre- 
served its rural aspect, and the quaint simplicity of whose plan 
and structures had always been marked among American towns 
— were assembled probably less than fifty persons to consider a 
paper prepared by a young Virginia lawyer, giving reasons for 
a Resolve which the assembly had adopted two days before. 
They were farmers, planters, lawyers, physicians, surveyors of 
land, with one eminent Presbyterian clergyman. A majority of 
tliem had been educated at such schools, or primitive colleges, 



ORATION REV. DR. R. S. STORRS. 281 

as then existed on this continent, while a few had enjoyed the 
rare advantage of training abroad, and foreign travel; but a 
considerable number, and among them some of the most influ- 
ential, had had no other education than that which they 
had gained by diligent reading while at their trades or on their 
farms. 

The figure to which our thoughts turn first is that of the au- 
thor of the careful paper on the details of which the discussion 
turned. It has no special majesty or charm, the slight tall 
frame, the sun-burned face, the gray eyes spotted with hazel, 
the red hah- which crowns the head; but already, at the age of 
thirty-three, the man has impressed himself on his associates as 
a master of principles, and of the language in which those prin- 
ciples find expression, so that his colleagues have left to him, 
almost wholly, the work of preparing the important Declaration. 
He wants readiness in debate, and so is now silent; but he lis- 
tens eagerly to the vigorous argument and the forcible appeals 
of one of his feUows on the committee, Mr. John Adams, and 
now and then speaks with another of the committee, much older 
than himself — a stout man, with a friendly face, in a plain dress, 
whom the world had already heard something of as Benjamin 
Franklin. These three are perhaps most prominently before us 
as we recall the vanished scene, though others were there of fine 
presence and cultivated manners, and though all impress us as 
substantial and respectable representative men, however harsh 
the features of some, however brawny their hands with labor. 
But certainly nothing could be more unpretending, more desti- 
tute of pictorial charm than that small assembly of persons for 
the most part quite unknown to previous fame, and half of whose 
names it is not probable that half of us in this assembly could 
now repeat. 

After a discussion somewhat prolonged, as it seemed at the 
time, especially as it had been continued from previous days, 
and after some minor amendments of the paper, toward evening 
it was adopted, and ordered to be sent to the several States, 
signed by the president and the secretary; and the simple tran- 
saction was complete. Whatever there may have been of pro- 
clamation and bell-ringing appears to have come on subsequent 



282 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

days. It was almost a full month before the paper was en- 
grossed, and signed by the members. It must have been nearly 
or quite the same time before the news of its adoption had 
reached the remoter parts of the land. 

If pomp of circumstances were necessary to make an event 
like this great and memorable, there would have been others in 
our own history more worthy far of our commemoration. As 
matched against multitudes in general history, it would sink 
into instant and complete insignificance. Yet here, to-day, a 
hundred years from the adoption of that paper, in a city which 
counts its languages by scores, and beats with the thread of a 
million feet, in a country whose enterprise flies abroad over sea 
and land on the rush of engines not then imagined, in a time so 
full of exciting hopes that it hardly has leisure to contemplate 
the past, we pause from aU our toil and traffic, our eager plans 
and impetuous debate, to commemorate the event. The whole 
land pauses, as I have said; and some distinct impression of it 
will follow the sun, wherever he climbs the steep of Heaven, until 
in all countries it has more or less touched the thoughts of men. 

Why is this ? is a question, the answer to which should inter- 
pret and vindicate our assemblage. 

It is not simply because a century happens to have passed 
since the event thus remembered occurred. A hundred years 
are always closing from some event, and have been since 
Adam was in his prime. There was, of course, some special im- 
portance in the action then accomplished — in the nature of that 
action, since not in its circumstances — to justify such long re- 
cord of it ; and that importance it is ours to define. In the 
perspective of distance the small things disappear, while the 
great and eminent keep their place. As Carlyle has said : " A 
king in the midst of his body-guards, with his trumpets, war- 
horses, and gilt standard-bearers, will look great though he be 
little; only some Roman Carus can give audience to satrap am- 
bassadors, while seated on the ground, with a woolen cap, and 
supping on boiled pease, like a common soldier."* 

What was, then, the great reality of power in what was done 
a hundred years since, which gives it its masterful place in his- 
tory — makes it Roman and regal amid all its simplicity ? 

* IJssay on Schiller. Essays : Vol. II., p. 301- 



ORATION — REV. DR. R. S. STORRS. 283 

Of course, as the prime element of its power, it was the action 
of a People, and not merely of persons ; and such action of a 
People, has always a momentum, a public force, a historic, sig- 
nificance, which can pertain to no individual arguments and 
appeals. There are times, indeed, when it has the energy and 
authority in it of a secular inspiration ; when the supreme soul 
which rules the world comes through it to utterance, and a 
thought surpassing man's wisest plan, a will transcending his 
strongest purpose, is heard in its commanding voice. 

It does not seem extravagant to say that the time to which 
our thoughts are turned was one of these. 

For a century and a half the emigrants from Europe had 
brought hither, not the letters alone, the arts and industries, or 
the religious convictions, but the hardy moral and political life, 
which had there been developed in ages of strenous struggle and 
work. France and Germany, Holland and Sweden, as well as 
England, Scotland, and Ireland, had contributed to this. The 
Austrian Tyrol, the Bavarian highlands, the Bohemian plain, 
Denmark, even Portugal, had their part in this colonization. 
The ample domain which here received the earnest immigrants 
had imparted to them of its own oneness ; and diversities of 
language race, and custom, had fast disappeared in the govern- 
ing unity of a common aspiration, and a common purpose to 
work out through freedom a nobler well-being. 

The general moral life of this people, so various in origin, so 
accordant in spirit, had only risen to grander force through 
the toil and strife, the austere training, the long patience of en- 
durance, to which it here had been subjected. The exposures 
to heat, and cold, and famine, to unaccustomed labors, to 
alternations of climate unknown in the old world, to ma- 
larial forces brooding above the mellow and drainless recent 
lands — these had fatally stricken many; but those who sur- 
vived were tough and robust, the more so, perhaps, because of 
the perils which they had surmounted Education was not easy, 
books were not many, and the daily newspaper was unknown; 
but political discussion had been always going on, and men's 
minds had gathered unconscious force as they strove with each 
other, in eager debate, on questions concerning the common 



284 OUE NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

welfare. They bad had much experience in subordinate legis- 
lation, on the local matters belonging to their care; had ac- 
quired dexterity in performing public business, and had ofteD 
had to resist or amend the suggestions or dictates of Royal gov- 
ernors. For a recent people, dwelling apart from older and 
conflicting States, they had had a large experience in war, the 
crack of the rifle being never unfamiliar along the near frontier, 
where disciplined skill was often combined with savage fuiy 
to sweep with sword or scar with fire their scattered settle- 
ments. 

By every species, therefore, of common work, of discussion 
endurance, and martial struggle, the descendants of the colon- 
ists scattered along the American coast had been allied to each 
other. They were more closely allied than they knew. It 
needed only some signal occasion, some summons to a sudden 
heroic decision, to bring them into instant general combina- 
tion ; and Huguenot and Hollander, Swede, German, and 
Protestant Portuguese, as well as Englishman, Scotchman, 
Irishman, would then forget that their ancestors had been dif- 
ferent, in the supreme consciousness that now they had a com- 
mon country, and before all else were all of them Americans. 

That time had come. That consciousness had for fifteen 
years been quickening in the people, since the " Writs of Assis- 
tance " had been applid for and granted, in 1761, when Otis, 
resigning his honorable position under the crown, had flung 
himself against the alarming innovation with an eloquence as 
blasting as the stroke of the lightning which in the end destroyed 
his life. With every fresh invasion by England of their popular 
liberties, with every act which threatened such invasion by 
providing opportunity and the instruments for it, the sense of 
a common privilege and right, of a common inheritance in the 
country they were fashioning out of the forest, of a common 
place in the history of the world, had been increased among 
the colonists. They were plain people, with no strong tenden- 
cies to the ideal. They wanted only a chance for free growth ; 
but they must have that, and have it together, though the con- 
tinent cracked. The diamond is formed, it has sornetini: s 
been supposed, under a swift enormous pressure, of masses 



ORATION — REV. DR. R. S. STORRS. 285 

meeting, and forcing the carbon into a crystal. The ultimate 
spirit of the American colonists was formed in like manner ; 
the weight of a reeky continent beneath, the weight of an 
oppression only intolerable because undefined pressing on it 
from above. But now that spirit, of inestimable price, reflect- 
ing light from every angle, and harder to be broken than any- 
thing material, was suddenly shown in acts and declarations of 
conventions and assemblies from the Penobscot to the St. 
Mary's. 

Any commanding public temper, once established in a people 
grows bolder, of course, more inquisitive and incentive, more 
sensible of its rights, more determined on its future, as it comes 
more frequently into exercise. This in the colonies lately had had 
been the most significant of all its expressions, up to that point, 
in the resolves of a popular assemblies that the time had come 
for a final separation from the kingdom of Great Britain. The 
eminent Congre'ss of two years before had given it • powerful 
reinforcement. Now, at last, it entered the representative 
American assembly, and claimed from that the ultimate word. 
It found what it sought. The Declaration was only the voice 
of that supreme, impersonal force, that will of communities, 
that universal soul of the State. 

The vote of the colony then thinly covering a part of the 
spaces not yet wholly occupied by this great State, was not, 
indeed, at once formally given for such an instrument. It was 
wisely delayed, under the judicious counsel of Jay, till a pro- 
vincial Congress could assemble, specially called, and formally 
authorized, to pronounce the deliberate resolve of the colony ; 
and so it happened that only twelve colonies voted at first for 
the great Declaration, and that New York was not joined to 
the number till five days later. But Jay knew, and all knew, 
that numerous, wealthy, eminent in character, high in position 
as were those here and elsewhere in the country — in Massa- 
chusetts, in Virginia, and in the Carolinas — who were by no 
means yet prepared to sever their connection with Great 
Britain, the general and governing mind of the people was fixed 
upon this, with a decision which nothing could change, with a 
tenacity which nothing could break. The forces tending to 



28G OUK NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

that result had wrought to their development with a steadiness 
and strength which the stiibbornest resistance had hardly de- 
layed . The spirit which now shook light and impulse over the 
land was recent in its precise demand, but as old in its birth as 
the first Christian settlements ; and it was that spirit — not of 
one, nor of fifty, not of all the individuals in all the conven- 
tions, but the vaster spirit which lay behind — which put itself 
on sudden record through the prompt and accurate pen of 
Jefferson. 

He was himself in full sympathy with it, and only by reason 
of that sympathy c raid give it such consummate expression 
Not out of books, legal researches, historical inquiry, the careful 
and various studies of language, came that document ; but out 
of repeated public debate, out of manifold personal and private 
discussion, out of his clear sympathetic observation of the 
changing feeling and thought of men, out of that exquisite 
personal sensibility to vague and impalpable popular impulses 
which was in him innately combined with artistic taste, an idea 
nature, and rare power of philosophical thought. The voice of 
the cottage as well as the college, of the church as well as the 
legislative assembly, was in the paper. It echoed the talk of the 
farmer in home-spun, as well as the classic eloquence of Lee, or 
the terrible tones of Patrick Henry. It gushed at last from the 
pen of its writer, like the fountain from the roots of Lebanon, 
a brimming river when it issues from the rock ; but it was be- 
cause its sources had been supplied, its fullness filled, by unseen 
springs ; by the rivulets winding far up among the cedars, and 
percolating through hidden crevices in the stone ; by melting- 
snows, whose white sparkle seemed still on the stream ; by 
fierce rains, with which the basins above were drenched ; by 
even the dews, silent and wide, which had lain in stillness all 
night upon the hill. 

The Platonic idea of the development of the State was thus re- 
alized here ; lirst Ethics, then Politics. A public opinion, energetic 
and dominant took its place from the start as the chief instru- 
ment of the new civilization. No dashing manoeuvre of skillful 
commanders, no sudden burst of popular passion, was in the 
Declaration ; but the vast mystery of a supreme and imperative 



ORATION REV. DR. R. S. STORRS. 287 

public life, at once diffused and intense — behind all persons, 
before all plans, beneath which individual wills are exalted, at 
whose touch the personal mind is inspired, and under whose 
transcendent impulse the smallest instrument becomes of a terrific 
force. That made the Declaration ; and that makes it now, in 
its modest brevity, take its place with Magna Charta and the 
Petition of Right, as full as they of vital force, and destined to a 
parallel permanence. 

Because this intense common life of a determined and mani- 
fold People was not behind them, other documents, in form 
similar to this, and in polish and cadence of balanced phrase 
perhaps its superiors, have had no hold like that which it keeps 
on the memory of men. What papers have challenged the at- 
tention of mankind within the century, in the stately Spanish 
tongue, in Mexico, New Granada, Venezuela, Bolivia, or the 
Argentine Republic, which the world at large has now quite 
forgotten ! How the resonant proclamations of German or 
of French Republicans, of Hungarian or Spanish revolutionists 
and patriots, have vanished as sound absorbed in the air ! 
Eloquent, persuasive, just, as they were, with a vigor of thought, 
a fervor of passion, a fine completeness and symmetry of 
expression, in which they could hardly be surpassed, they have 
now only a literary value. They never became great general 
forces. They were weak, because they were personal ; and 
history is too crowded, civilization is too vast, to take much im- 
pression from occasional documents. Only then is a paper. of 
secular force, or long remembered, when behind it is the ubi- 
quitous energy of the popular will, rolling through its words in 
vast diapason, and charging its clauses with tones of thunder. 

Because such an energy was behind it, our Declaration had 
its majestic place and meaning; and they who adopted it saw 
nowhere else 

So rich advantage of a promised glory, 

As smiled upon the forehead of their action. 

Because of that, we read it still, and look to have it as audible 
as now, among the dissonant voices of the world, when other 
generations, in long succession, have come and gone ! 

But further, too, it must be observed that this paper, adopted 



288 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

a hundred years since, was not merely the declaration of a Peo- 
ple, as distinguished from eminent and cultured individuals — a 
confession before the world of the public State-faith, rather than 
a political thesis — but it was also the declaration of a People 
which claimed for its own a great inheritance of equitable laws, 
and of practical liberty, and which now was intent to enlarge 
and enrich that. It had roots in the past, and a long 
genealogy; and so it had a vitality inherent, and an immense 
energy. 

They who framed it went back, indeed, to first principles. 
There was something philosophic and ideal in their scheme, as 
always there is when the general mind is deeply stirred. It was 
not superficial. Yet they were not undertaking to establish 
new theories, or to build their state upon artificial plans and 
abstract speculations. They were simply evolving out of the 
past what therein had been latent; were liberating into free 
exhibition and unceasing activity, a vital force older than the 
history of their colonization, and wide as the lands from which 
they came. They had the sweep of vast impulses behind them. 
The slow tendencies of centuries came to sudden consummation 
in their Declaration; and the force of its impact upon the af- 
fairs and the mind of the world was not to be measured by its 
contents alone, but by the relation in which these stood to all 
the vehement discussion and struggle of which it was the latest 
outcome. 

This ought to be, always, distinctly observed. 

The tendency is strong, and has been general, among those 
who have introduced great changes in the government of states, 
to follow some plan of political, perhaps of social innovation, 
which enlists their judgment, excites their fancy, and to make a 
comely theoretic habitation for the national household, rather 
than to build on the old foundations — expanding the walls, lift- 
ing the height, enlarging the doorways, enlightening with new 
windows the halls, but still keeping the strength and renewing 
the age of an old familiar and venerated structure. You re- 
member how in France, in 1789, and the following years, the 
schemes of those whom Napoleon called the " ideologists " suc- 
ceeded each other, no one of them gaining a permanent suprema- 



ORATION REV. DR. R. S. STORES. 289 

cy, though each included important elements, till the armed 
consulate of 1799 swept them all into the air, and put in place 
of them one masterful genius and ambitious will. You remem- 
ber how in Spain, in 1812, the new Constitution proclaimed by 
the Cortes was thought to inaugurate with beneficent provisions 
a wholly new era of development and progress; yet how the 
history of the splendid peninsula, from that day to this, has 
been but the record of a struggle to the death between the Old 
and the New, the contest as desperate, it would seem, in our 
time as it was at the first. 

It must be so, always, when a preceding state of society and 
government, which has got itself established through many 
generations, is suddenly superseded by a different fabric, how- 
ever more evidently conformed to right reason. The principle 
is not so strong as the prejudice. Habit masters invention. 
The new and theoretic shivers its force on the obstinate coher- 
ence of the old and the established. The modern structure fails 
and is replaced, while the grim feudal keep, though scarred and 
weather-worn, the very cement seeming gone from its walls, 
still scowls defiance at the red right-hand of the lightning it- 
self. 

It -was no such rash speculative change wdiich here was at- 
tempted. The People whose deputies framed our Declaration 
were largely themselves descendants of Englishmen ; and those 
who were not, had lived long enough under English institutions 
to be impressed with their tendency and spirit. It was there- 
fore only natural that even when adopting that ultimate mea- 
sure which severed them from the British crown, they should 
retain all that had been gained in the mother-land through cen- 
turies of endurance and strife. They left nothing that was 
good ; they abolished the bad, added the needful, and develop- 
ed into a rule for the continent the splendid precedents of great 
former occasions. They shared still the boast of Englishmen 
that their constitution " has no single date from which its dura- 
tion is to be reckoned," and that " the origin of the English law 
is as undiscoverable as that of the Nile." They went back 
themselves, for the origin of their liberties, to the most ancient 
muniments of English freedom. Jefferson had affirmed, in 



290 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

1774, that a primitive charter of American Independence lay in 
tlie fact that as the Saxons had left their native wilds in the 
North of Europe, and bad occupied Britain — the country which 
they left asserting over them no further control, nor any de- 
pendence of them upon it — so the Englishmen coming hither 
had formed, by that act, another state, over which Parliament 
had no rights, in which its laws were void till accepted.* 

But while seeking for their liberties so archaic a basis, neither 
he nor his colleagues were in the least careless of what subse- 
quent times had done to complete them. There was not one 
element of popular right, which had been wrested from crown 
and noble in any age, which they did not keep ; not an equitable 
rule, for the transfer or the division of property, for the pro- 
tection of personal rights, or for the detection and punishment 
of crime, which was not precious in their eyes. Even Chancery 
jurisdiction they widely retained, with the distinct tribunals, 
derived from the ecclesiastical courts, for probate of wills ; and 
English technicalities were maintained in their courts, almost 
as if they were sacred" things. Especially that equality 
of civil rights among all commoners, which Hallam declares 
the most prominent characteristic of the English Constitution — 
the source of its permanence, its improvement, and its vigor — 
they perfectly preserved ; they only more sharply affirmatively 
declared it. Indeed, in renouncing their allegiance to the king, 
and putting the United Colonies in his place, they felt them- 
selves acting in intimate harmony with the spirit and drift of 
the ancient constitution. The Executive here was to be elective, 
not hereditary, to be limited and not permanent in the term of 
his functions ; and no established peerage should exist. But 
each State retained its governor, its legislature, generally in two 
houses, its ancient statute and common law ; and if they had 
been challenged for English authority for their attitude toward 
the crown, they might have replied in the words of Bracton, the 
Lord Chief-Justice five hundred years before, under the reign of 
Henry the Third, that " the law makes the king ;" " there is no 
king, where will, and not lav>, bears rule ;" "if the king were 

* Works, Vol I. p. 125. 



ORATION — REV. DR. R. S. STORRS. 291 

without a bridle, that is the law, they ought to put a bridle upon 
him."* They might have replied in the words of Fox, speak- 
ing in Parliament, in daring defiance of the temper of the House, 
but with many supporting him, when he said that in declaring 
Independence, they " had done no more than the English had 
done against James the Second."f 

They had done no more ; though they had not elected 
another king in place of him whom they renounced. Thoy had 
taken no step so far in advance of the then existing English 
Constitution as those which the Parliament of 1640 took in 
advance of the previous Parliaments which Charles had dis- 
solved. If there was a right more rooted than another in that 
Constitution, it was the right of the people which was taxed to 
have its vote in the taxing legislature. If there was anything 
more accordant than another with its historic temper and tenor, 
it was that the authority of the king was determined when his 
rule became tyrannous. Jefferson had but perfectly expressed 
the doctrine of the lovers of freedom in England for many gen- 
erations, when he said in his Summary view of the Rights of 
of America, in 1774, that " the monarch is no more than 

* Ipse autem rex, non debet esse sub homine, sed sub Deo et sub Lege, 
quia Lex facit regem. Attribuat igiiur rex Legi quod Lex attribuit ei, 
Vidi licet dominationcm et potestatem, non est enim rex ubi dominatur 
voluntas et non Lex. Do Leg. et Cons. Angliae ; Lib. I., cap 8, P. 5. 

Rex autem habet superioreni, Deum. Item, Legem, per quam factus 
est rex. Item, curiam suam, videlicet comites, Bai ones, quia, comites 
dicuntur quasi socii regis, tt qui habet socium habet magistrum ; et idi o 
si rex merit sine fraeuo, i. e sine Lege, debent ei fraenum ponere ; etc. 
Lib. II., cap. 1G. P. :5. 

The following is still more explicit : " As the head of a body natural 
cannot change its nerves and sinews, cannot deny to the several parts 
their proper energy, their due proportion and ailment of blood ; neither 
can a King, who is the head of a body politic, change the laws thereof, nor 
take from the people what is theirs by right, against their consent. * 
For he is appointed to protect his subjects in their lives, properties, and 
laws ; for this very end and purpose he has the delegation of power from 
the people, and he has no just claim to any other power but this." Sir 
John Fortescue's Treatise, De Laudibus Legum Angliae, c. 9, (about A. 
D. 1470,) quoted byHallam, Mid. Ages, chap. VIII., partllL 

t Speech of October 31, 1776 : "The House divided en the Amend 
ment. Yeas, 87 ; nays, 242." 



292 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

the chief officer of the people, appointed by the laws, and cir- 
cumscribed with definite powers, to assist in working the great 
machine of government, erected for their use, and consequently 
subject to their superintendence;" that "kings are the ser- 
vants, not the proprietors of the people ;" and that a nation 
claims its rights, " as derived from the laws of nature not as 
the gift of their chief magistrate." * 

That had been the spirit, if not as yet the formulated doc- 
trine, of Ealeigh, Hampden, Eussell, Sydney — of all the great 
leaders of liberty in England. Milton had declared it, in a 
prose as majestic as any passage of the Paradise Lost. The 
Commonwealth had been built on it ; and the whole Kevolu- 
tion of 1688. And they who now framed it into their perman- 
ent organic law, and made it supreme in the country they were 
shaping, were in harmony with the noblest inspirations of the 
past. They were not innovating with a rash recklessness. 
They were simply accepting and re-affirming what they had 
learned from luminous events and illustrous men. So their 
work had a dignity, a strength, and a permanence which 
can never belong to mere fresh speculation. It interlocked 
with that of multitudes going before. It derived a virtue from 
every field of struggle in England ; from every scaffold, hal- 
lowed by free and consecrated blood ; from every hour of great 
debate. It was only the complete development into law, for a 
separated people, of that august ancestral liberty, the germs of 
which had preceded the Heptarchy, the gradual definition and 
establishment of which had been the glory of English history. 
A thousand years brooded over the room where they asserted 
hereditary rights. Its walls showed neither portraits nor 
mottoes ; but the Kaiser-saal at Frankfort was not hung 
around with such recollections. No titles were worn by those 
plain men ; but there had not been one knightly soldier, or one 

* Eulers are no more than, attorneys, agents, trustees, for the people, 
and if the cause, the interest and trust, is insidiously betrayed, or wan- 
tonly trifled away, the people have a right to revoke the authority that 
they themselves have deputed, and to constitute abler and better agents, 
attorneys, and trustees. — John Adams. Dissertation on Canon and Feu- 
dal Law ; 1765. Works : Vol. III., pp. 456-7. 



ORATION REV. DR. R. S. STORES. 293 

patriotic and prescient statesman, standing for liberty in the 
splendid centuries of its English growth, who did not touch 
them with unseen accolade, and bid them be faithful. The 
pajDer which they adopted, fresh from the pen of its young 
author, and written on his hired pine table, was already in es- 
sential life, of a venerable age ; and it took immense impulse, 
it derived an instant and vast authority, from its relation to 
that undying past in which they too had grand inheritance, and 
from which their public life had come. 

Englishmen themselves now recognize this, and often are 
proud of it. The distinguished representative of Great Britain 
at Washington may think his government, as no doubt he does, 
superior to ours ; but his clear eye cannot fail to see that Eng- 
lish liberty was the parent of ours, and that the new and broader 
continent here opened before it, suggested that expansion of it 
which we celebrate to-day. His ancestors, like ours, helped to 
build the Kepublic ; and its faithfulness to the past, amid all 
reformations, was one great secret of its earliest triumph, has 
been one source, from that day to this, of its enduring and 
prosperous strength. 

The Congress, and the People behind it, asserted for them- 
selves hereditary liberties, and hazarded everything in the 
purpose to complete them. But they also affirmed, with em- 
phasis and effect, another right, more general than this, which 
made their action significant and important to other peoples, 
which made it, indeed, a signal to the nations of the right of 
each to assert for itself the just prerogative of forming its gov- 
ernment, electing its rulers, ordaining its laws, as might to it 
seem most expedient. Hear again the immortal words : " We 
hold these truths to be self-evident ; * * that to secure these 
[unalienable] rights, governments are instituted among men, 
deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed ; 
that whenever any form of government becomes destructive of 
these ends, it is the right of the people to altar or to abolish it, 
and to institute a new government, laying its foundations in 
such principles, and organizing its powers in such form, as to 
them shall seem most likely to effect their safety and happiness.'' 

This is what the party of Bentham called " the assumption of 



294 oil; NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

natural rights, claimed without the slightest evidence of their 
existence, and supported by vague and declamatory generalities." 
This is what we receive as the decisive and noble declaration, 
spoken with the simplicity of a perfect conviction, of a natural 
right as patent as the continent ; a declaration which chaUenged 
at once the attention of mankind, and which is now practically 
assumed as a premise in international relations and public 
law. 

Of course it was not a new discovery. It was old as the 
earliest of political philosophers ; as old, indeed, as the earliest 
communities, which, becoming established in particular loca- 
tions, had there developed their own institutions, and repelled 
with vehemence the assaults that would change them. But in 
the growth of political societies, and the vast expansion of im- 
perial states, by the conquest of those adjacent and weaker, this 
right, so easily recognized at the outset, so germane to the 
instincts, so level with the reason, of every community, had 
widely passed out of men's thoughts ; and the power of a con- 
quering state to change the institutions and laws of a people, 
or impose on it new ones, — the power of a parent state to shape 
the forms and prescribe the rules of the colonies which went 
from it, — had been so long and abundantly exercised, that the 
very right of the people, thus conquered or colonial, to consult 
its own interests in the frame of its government, had been 
almost forgotten. 

It might be a high speculation of scholars, or a charming 
dream of political enthusiasts. But it was not a maxim for the 
practical statesman ; and whatever its correctness as an ideal 
principle, it was vain to expect to see it established in a world full 
of kings who claimed, each for himself, an authority from God, 
and full of states intent on grasping and governing by their law 
adjacent domains. The revolt of the Netherlands against Span- 
ish domination had been the one instance in modern history in 
which the inherent right of a People to suit itself in the frame of 
its government had been proclaimed, and then maintained ; and 
that had been at the outset a paroxysmal revolt, against tyranny 
so crushing, and cruelties so savage, that they took it out of the 
line of examples. The Dutch Republic was almost as excep- 



ORATION — REV. DR. R. S. STORRS. 295 

tional, through the fierce wickedness which had crowded it into 
being, as was Switzerland itself, on the Alpine heights. For an 
ordinary state to claim self-regulation, and found its govern, 
ment on ;t Plebiscit, was to contradict precedent, and to set at 
defiance European tradition. 

Our fathers, however, in a somewhat vague way, had held 
from the start that they had right to an autonomy ; and that 
acts of Parliament, if not appointments of the crown, took pro- 
per effect upon these shores only by reason of their assent. 
Their characters were held to confirm this doctrine. The con- 
viction, at first practical and instinctive, rather than theoretic, 
had grown with their growth, and had been intensified into posi- 
tive affirmation and public exhibition as the British rule im- 
pinged more sharply on their interests and their hopes. It had 
finally become the general and decisive conviction of the colo- 
nics. It had spoken already in armed resistance to the troops 
of the King. It had been articulated, with gathering emphasis, 
in many resolves of assemblies and conventions. It was now, 
finally, most energetically, set forth to the world in the great 
Declaration ; and in that utterance, made general, rot particu- 
lar, and founding the rights of the people in this country on 
principles as wide as humanity itself, there lay an appeal to 
every nation : — an appeal whose words took unparalleled force, 
were illuminated and made rubrical, in the fire and blood of the 
following war. 

When the Emperor Ferdinand visited Innsbruck, that beauti- 
ful town of the Austrian Tyrol, in 1838, it is said that the in- 
habitants wrote his name in immense bonfires, along the sides 
of the precipitous hills which shelter the town. Over a space 
of four or five miles extended that colossal illumination, till the 
heavens seemed on fire in the far-reflected upstreaming glow. 
The right of a people, separated from others, to its own institu- 
tions — our fathers wrote this in lines so vivid and so large that 
the whole world could see them ; and they followed that writing 
with the consenting thunder* of so many cannon that even the 
lands across the Alantic were shaken and filled with the long 
reverberation. 

The doctrine had, of course, in every nation, its two-fold in- 



296 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

ternal application, as well as its front against external powers. 
On the one hand it swept with destroying force against the 
nation, so long maintained, of the right of certain families in 
the world, called Hapsburg, Bourbon, Stuart, or whatever, to 
govern the rest; and wherever it was received it made the 
imagined divine right of kings an obsolete and contemptible 
fiction. On the other hand, it smote with equal energy against 
the pretensions of any minority within the state — whether 
banded together by the ties of descent, or of neighborhood in 
location, or of common opinion, or supposed common interest 
■ — to govern the rest; or even to impair the established and para- 
mount government of the rest by separating themselves organ- 
ically from it. 

It was never the doctrine of the fathers that the people of 
Kent, Cornwall, or Lincoln, might sever themselves from the 
rest of England, and, while they had their voice and vote in the 
public councils, might assert the right to govern the whole, un- 
der threat of withdrawal if their minor vote were not suffered 
to control. They were not seeking to initiate anarchy, and to 
make it thenceforth respectable in the world by support of their 
suffrages. They recognized the fact that the state exists to 
meet permanent needs, is the ordinance of God as well as the 
family; and that He has determined the bounds of men's habi- 
tation, by rivers, seas, and mountain chains, shaping countries 
as well as continents into physical coherence, while giving one 
man his birth on the north of the Pyrenees, another on the 
south, one on the terraced banks of the Rhine, another in Eng- 
lish meadow or upland. They saw that a common and fixed 
habitation, in a country thus physically defined, especially when 
combined with community of descent, of permanent public in- 
terest, and of the language on which thought is interchanged— 
that these make a People; and such a People, as a true and 
abiding body-politic, they affirmed had right to shape its gov- 
ernment, forbidding others to intermeddle. 

But it must be the general mind of the People which deter- 
mined the questions thus involved ; not a dictating class within 
the state, whether known as peers or associated commoners, 
whether scattered widely, as one among several political parties, 



ORATION REV. DR. R. S. STORRS. 297 

or grouped together in some one section, and having a special 
interest to encourage. The decision of the general public mind, 
as deliberately reached, and authentically declared, that must 
be the end of debate ; and the right of resistance, or the right 
of division, after that, if such right exist, it is not to be vin- 
dicated from their Declaration. Any one who thought such 
government by the whole intolerable to him was always at lib- 
erty to expatriate himself, and find elsewhere such other institu- 
tions as he might prefer. But he could not tarry, and still not 
submit. He was not a monarch, without the crown, before 
whose contrary judgment and will the public councils must be 
dumb. "While dwelling in the land, and having the same op- 
portunity with others to seek the amendment of what he dis- 
approved, the will of the whole was binding upon him and 
that obligation he could not vacate by refusing to accept it. If 
one could not, neither could ten, nor a hundred, nor a million, 
who still remained a minority of the whole. 

To allow such a right would have been to make government 
transparently impossible. Not separate sections only, but coun- 
ties, townships, school districts, neighborhoods, must have the 
same right ; and each individual, with his own will for his final 
law, must be the complete ultimate State. 

It was no such disastrous folly which the fathers of our Re- 
public affirmed. They ruled out kings, princes, peers, from any 
control over the People ; and they did not give to a transient 
minority, wherever it might appear, on whatever question, a 
greater privilege, because less defined, than that which they 
jealously withheld from these classes. Such a tyranny of irre- 
sponsible occasional minorities would have seemed to them only 
more intolerable than that of classes, organized, permanent, 
and limited by law. And when it was affirmed by some, and 
silently feared by many others, that in our late immense civil 
war the multitudes who adhered to the old Constitution had 
forgotton or discarded the principles of the earlier Declaration, 
those assertions and fears were alike without reason. The Peo- 
ple which adopted that Declaration, when distributed into col- 
onies, was the People which afterward, when compacted into 
states, established the Confederation of 1781 — imperfect enough, 



29S OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

but whoso abiding renown it is that under it the war was ended 
It was the same People which subsequently framed the supreme 
Constitution. " We, the people of the United States," do ordain 
and establish the following Constitution, — so runs the majestic 
and vital instrument. It contains provisions for its own 
emendation. When the people will, they may set it aside, and 
put in place of it one wholly different ; and no other nation can 
intervene. But while it continues, it, and the laws made nor- 
mally under it, are not subject to resistance by a portion of the 
people, conspiring to direct or limit the rest. And whensoever 
any pretension like this shall appear, if ever again it does appear 
it will undoubtedly as instantly appear that, even as in the past 
so in the future, the people whose our government is, and whose 
complete and magnificent domain God has marked out for it, 
will subdue resistance, compel submission, forbid secession, 
though it cost again, as it cost before, four years of war, with 
treasure uncounted and inestimable life. 

The right of a People upon its own territory, as equally 
against any classes within it or any external powers, this is the doc- 
trine of our Declaration. We know how it here has been'applied, 
and how settled it is upon these shores for the time to come 
We know, too, something of what impression it instantly made 
upon the minds of other peoples, and how they sprang to greet 
and accept it. In the fine image of Bancroft, " the astonished 
nations, as they read that all men are created equal, started out 
of their lethargy, like those who have been exiles from child- 
hood, when they suddenly hear the dimly-remembered accents 
of their mother-tongue."* 

The theory of scholars had now become the maxim of a State. 
The diffused intellectual nebulous light had got itself concen- 
trated into an orb ; and the radiance of it, penetrating and hot, 
shone afar. You know how France responded to it ; with pas- 
sionate speed seeking to be rid of the terrific establishments in 
church and state which had nearly crushed the life of the peo- 
ple, and with a beautiful though credulous unreason trying to 
lift, by the grasp of the law, into intelligence and political ca- 
pacity the masses whose training for thirteen centuries had been 

* Vol. VIII. , p. 473. 



OKATION — REV. DR. R. S. STORRS. 299 

despotic. No operation of natural law was any more certain 
than the failure of that too daring experiment. But the very 
failure involved progress from it ; involved, undoubtedly, that 
ultimate success which it was vain to try to extemporize. Cer- 
tainly the other European powers will not again intervene, as 
they did, to restore a despotism which France has abjured, and 
with foreign bayonets to uphold institutions which it does not 
desire. Italy, Spain, Germany, England — they are not Repub- 
lican in the form of their government, nor as yet democratic in 
the distribution of power. But each of them is as full of this 
organific, self-demonstrating doctriue, as is our own land ; and 
England would send no troops to Canada to compel its submis- 
sion if it should decide to set up for itself. Neither Italy nor 
Spain would maiutaiu a monarchy a moment longer than the 
general mind of the country preferred it. Germany would be 
fused in the fire of one passion if any foreign nation whatever 
should assume to dictate the smallest change in one of its laws. 
The doctrine of the proper prerogative of kings, derived from 
God, which in the last century was more common in Europe 
than the doctriue of tho centrality of the sun in our planetary 
system, is now as obsolete among the intelligent as are the epi- 
cycles of Ptolemy. Every government expects to stand hence- 
forth by assent of the governed, and by no other claim of right. 
It is strong by beneficence, not by tradition; and at the height 
of its military successes it circulates appeals, and canvasses for 
ballots. Revolution is carefully sought to be averted, by timely 
and tender amelioration of the laws. The most progressive and 
liberal states are most evidently secure; while those which 
stand, like old olive-trees at Tivoli, with feeble arms supported 
on pillars, and hollow trunks filled up with stone, are palpably 
only tempting the blast. An alliance of sovereigns, like that 
called the Holy, for reconstructing the map of Europe, and par- 
celling out the passive peoples among separate governments, 
would to-day be no more impossible than would Charlemagne's 
plan for reconstructing the empire of the West. Even Murad, 
Sultan of Turkey, now takes the place of Abdul the deposed, 
" by the grace of God, and the will of the people;" and that ac- 
complished and illusti-ious Prince, whose empire under the 



300 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Southern Cross rivals our own in its extent, and most nearly 
approaches it on this hemisphere in stability of institutions and 
in practical .freedom, has his surest title to the throne which he 
honors, in his wise liberality, and his faithful endeavor for the 
good of his people. As long as in this he continues, as now, a 
recognized leader among the monarchs — ready to take and seek 
suggestions from even a democratic Republic — his throne will 
be steadfast as the water-sheds of Brazil; aud while his succes- 
sors maintain his spirit, no domestic insurrection will test the 
question whether they retain that celerity in movement with 
which Dom Pedro has astonished Americans. 

It is no more possible to reverse this tendency toward popu- 
lar sovereignty, and to substitute for it the right of families, 
classes, minorities, or of intervening foreign states, than it is to 
arrest the motion of the earth, and make it swing the other way 
in its annual orbit. In this, at least, our fathers' Declaration 
has made its impression on the history of mankind. 

It was the act of a People, and not of persons, except as these 
represented and led that. It was the act of a People, not start- 
ing out on new theories of government, so much as developing 
into forms of law and practical force a great and gradual inher- 
itance of freedom. It was the act of a Peoj)le, declaring for 
others, as for itself, the right of each to its own form of govern- 
ment without interference from other nations, without restraint 
by privileged classes. 

It only remains, then, to ask the question how far it has con- 
tributed to the peace, the advancement, and the permanent, 
welfare, of the People by which it was set forth ; of other 
nations which it has affected. And to ask this question is 
almost to answer it. The answer is as evident as the sun in 
the heavens. 

It certainly cannot be affirmed that we in America, any more 
than persons or peoples elsewhere, have reached as yet the 
ideal state, of private liberty combined with a perfect public 
order, or of culture complete, and a supreme character. The 
political world, as well as the religious, since Christ was on 
earth, looks forward, not backward, for its millennium. That 
Golden Age is still to come which is to shine in the perfect 



ORATION REV. DR. R. S. STORRS. 301 

splendor reflected i'roni Him who is ascended ; and no prophecy 
tells us how long before the advancing race shall reach and 
cross its glowing marge, or what long effort, or what tumults of 
battle are still to precede. 

In this country, too, there have been immense special im- 
pediments to hinder wide popular progress in things which are 
highest. Onr people have had a continent to subdue. They 
have been, from the start, in constant migration. Westward, 
from the counties of the Hudson and the Mohawk, around the 
lakes, over the prairies, across the great river — westward still, 
over alkali plains, across terrible canons, up gorges of the 
mountains where hardly the wild goat could find footing — 
westward always, till the Golden Gate opened out on the sea 
which has been made ten thousand miles wide, as if nothing 
less could stop the march — this has been the popular move- 
ment, from almost the day of the great Declaration. To-mor- 
row's tents have been pitched in new fields ; and last year's 
houses await new possessors. 

With such constant change, such wide dislocation of the 
mass of the people from early and settled home-associations, 
and with the incessant occupation of the thoughts by the great 
physical problems presented — not so much by any struggle for 
existence, as by harvests for which the prairies waited, by mills 
for which the rivers clamored, by the coal and the gold which 
offered themselves to the grasp of the miner — it would not have 
been strange if a great and dangarous decadence had occurred 
in that domestic and private virtue of which Home is the nur- 
sery, in that generous and reverent public spirit which is but 
the effluence of its combined rays. It would have been wholly 
too much to expect that under such influences the highest pro- 
gress should have been realized, in speculative thought, in ar- 
tistic culture, or in the researches of pure science. 

Accordingly, we find that in these departments not enough 
has been accomplished to make our progress signal in them, 
though here and there the eminent souls " that are like stars and 
dwell apart " have illumined themes highest with their high in- 
terpretation. But History has been cultivated among us, with 
an enthusiasm, to an extent, hardly, I think, to have been an- 



302 OUR NATIONAL JTJfelLEE. 

ticipated among a people so recent and, expectant ; and Prescott, 
Motley, Irving, Ticknor, with him upon whose splendid page all 
American history has been amply illustrated, are known as fa- 
miliarly and honored as highly in Europe as here. We have 
had as well distinguished poets, and have them now ; to whom 
the nation has been responsive ; who have not only sung them- 
selves, but through whom the noblest poems of the Old World 
have come into the English tongue, rendered in fit and perfect 
music, and some of whose minds, blossoming long ago in the 
solemn or beautiful fancies of youth, with perennial energy still 
ripen to new fruit as they near or cross their four-score years. 
In Medicine, and Law, as well as in Theology, in Fiction, Bi- 
ography, and the vivid Narrative of exploration and discovery, 
the people whose birth-day we commemorate has added some- 
thing to the possession of men. Its sculptors and painters have 
won high places in the brilliant realm of modern art. Publicists 
like Wheaton, jurists like Kent, have gained a celebrity reflect- 
ing honor on the land ; and if no orator, so vast in knowledge, 
so profound and discursive in philosophical thought, so affluent 
in imagery, and so glorious in diction, as Edmund Burke, has 
yet appeared, we must remember that centuries were needed to 
produce him elsewhere, and that any of the great Parliamentary 
debaters, aside from him, have been matched or surpassed in 
the hearing of those who have hung with rapt sympathetic at- 
tention on the lips of Clay, or of Bufus Choate, or have felt 
themselves listening to the mightiest mind which ever touched 
theirs when they stood beneath the imperial voice in which 
Webster spoke. 

In applied science there has been much done in the country j 
for which the world admits itself our grateful debtor. I need 
not multiply illustrations of this, from locomotives, printing- 
presses, sewing machines, revolvers, steam-reapers, bank-locks. 
One instance suffices, most signal of all. 

When Morse, from Washington, thirty-two years ago, sent 
over the wires his word to Baltimore, " What hath God 
wrought," he had given to all the nations of mankind an instru- 
ment the most sensitive, expansive, quickening, which the world 
yet possesses. He had bound the earth in electric network. 



ORATION — REV. DR. R. S. STORRS. 303 

England touches "India to-day,, and France Algeria, while we 
are in contact with all the continents, upon those scarcely per- 
ceptible nerves. The great strategist, like Yon Moltke, with 
these in his hands, from the silence of his office directs cam- 
paigns, dictates marches, wins victories ; the statesman in the 
cabinet inspires and regulates the distant diplomacies ; while 
the traveler in any port or mart is by the same marvel of me- 
chanism in instant communication with all centres of commerce. 
It is certainly not too much to say that no other invention of 
the world in this century has so richly deserved the medals, 
crosses, and diamond decorations, the applause of senates, the 
gifts of kings, which were showered upon its author, as did this 
invention, which finally taught and utilized the lightnings whose 
nature a signer of the great Declaration had made apparent. 

But after all it is not so much in special inventions, or in emi- 
nent attainments made by individuals, that we are to find the 
answer to the question, " What did that day a hundred years 
since accomplish for us ?" Still less is it found in the progress 
we have made in outward wealth and material success. This 
might have been made, approximately at least, if the British 
supremacy had here continued. The prairies would have been 
as productive as now, the mines of copper and silver and gold 
as rich and extensive, the coal-beds as vast, and the cotton-fields 
as fertile, if we had been born the subjects of the Georges, or of 
Victoria. Steam would have kept its propulsive force, and sea 
and land have been theatres of its triumph. The river would 
have been as smooth a highway for the commerce which seeks 
it ; and the leap of every mountain stream would have given as 
swift and constant a push to the wheels that set spindles and 
saws in motion. Electricity itself would have lost no property, 
and might have become as completely as now the fire-winged 
messenger of the thought of mankind. 

But what we have now, and should not have had except, for 
that paper which the Congress adopted, is the general and in- 
creasing popular advancement in knowledge, vigor, as I believe 
in moral culture, of which our country has been the arena, and 
in which lies its hope for the future. The independence of the 
nation has reacted, with sympathetic force, on the personal life 



304 OUK NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

/" which the nation includes. It has made men more resolute, 
aspiring, confident, and more susceptible to whatever exalts. 
The doctrine that all by creation are equal, — not in respect of 
physical force or of mental endowment, of means for culture or 
inherited privilege, but in respect of immortal faculty, of duty to 
each other, of right to protection and to personal development, 
— this has given manliness to the poor, enterprise to the weak, 
a kindling hope to the most obscure. It has made the individu- 
als of whom the nation is composed more alive to the forces 
which educate and exalt. 

There has been incessant motive, too, for the wide and con 
stant employment of these forces. It has been felt that, as th6 
People is sovereign here, that People must be trained in 
mind and spirit for its august and sovereign function. The es 
tablishment of common-schools, for a needful primary secular 
training, has been an instinct of Society, only recognized and 
repeated in provisions of statutes. The establishment of higher 
schools, classical and general, of colleges, scientific and profes- 
sional seminaries, has been as well the impulse of the nation, 
and the furtherance of them a care of governments. The 
immense expansion of the press in this country has been 
based fundamentally upon the same impulse, and has wrought 
with beneficent general force in the same direction. Religious 
instruction has gone as widely as this distribution of secular 
knowledge. 

It used to be thought that a Church dissevered from the 
State must be feeble. Wanting wealth of endowments and 
dignity of titles — its clergy entitled to no place among the peers, 
its revenues assured by no legal enactments — it must remain ob- 
scure and poor; while the absence of any external limitations, of 
parliamentary statutes and a legal creed, must leave it liable to 
endless division, and tend to its speedy disintegration into sects 
and schisms. It seemed as hopeless to look for strength, wealth, 
beneficence, for extensive educational and missionary work, to 
such churches as these, as to look for aggressive military organ- 
ization to a convention of farmers, or for the volume and thunder 
of Niagara to a thousand sinking and separate rills. 

But the work which was given to be done in this country Avas 



ORATION — REV. DR. R. S. STORRS. 305 

so great and momentous; and has been so constant, that match- 
ing itself against that work, the Church, under whatever name, 
has realized a strength, and developed an activity, wholly fresh 
in the world in modern times. It has not been antagonized by 
that instinct of liberty which always a wakens against its work 
where rehgion is required by law. It has seized the opportu- 
nity. Its ministers and members have had their own standards, 
leaders, laws, and sometimes have quarreled, fiercely enough, 
as to which were the better. But in the work which was set 
them to do, to give to the sovereign American people the knowl- 
edge of God in the Gospel of His Son, their only strife has been 
one of emulation — to go the furthest, to give the most, and to 
bless most largely the land and its future. 

The spiritual incentive has of course been supreme; but pa- 
triotism has added its impulse to the work. ■ It has been felt 
that Christianity is the basis of Republican empire, its bond of 
cohesion, its life-giving law; that the manuscript copies of the 
Gospels, sent by Gregory to Augustine at Canterbury, and still 
preserved on sixth century parchments at Oxford and Cam- 
bridge — more than Magna Charta itself, these are the roots of 
English liberty; that Magna Charta, and the Petition of Right, 
with our completing Declaration, were possible only because 
these had been before them. And so on in the work of keep- 
ing Christianity prevalent in the land, all earnest churches have 
eagerly striven. Their preachers have been heard where the 
pioneer's fire scarcely was kindled. Their schools have been 
gathered in the temporary camp, not less than in the hamlet or 
town. They have sent then- books with lavish distribution, they 
have scattered their Bibles like leaves of autumn, where settle- 
ments hardly were more than prophesied. In all languages of 
the land they have told the old story of the Law and the Cross, 
a present Redemption, and a coming Tribunal. The highest 
truths, most solemn and inspiring, have been the truths most 
constantly in hand. It has been felt that, in the highest sense, 
a muscular Christianity was indispensable where men lifted up 
axes upon the thick trees. The delicate speculations of the 
closet and the schools were too dainty for the work; and the old 
confessions of Councils and Reformers, whose undecaying and 



306 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

sovereign energy no use exhausts, have been those always most 
familiar, where the trapper on his stream, or the miner in his 
gulch has found priest or minister on his track. 

Of course not all the work has been fruitful. Not all God's 
acorns come to oaks, but here and there one. Not all the seeds 
of flowers germinate, but enough to make some radiant gar- 
dens. And out of all this work and gift, has come a mental 
and moral training, to the nation at large, such as it certainly 
would not have had except for this effort, the effort for which 
would not have been made, on a scale so immense, except for 
this incessant aim to fit the nation for its great experiment of 
self-regulation. The Declaration of Independence has been 
the great charter of Public Education ; has given impulse and 
scope to this prodigious Missionary work. 

The result of the whole is evident enough. I am not here 
as the eulogist of our People, beyond what facts justify. I 
admit, with regret, that American manners sometimes are 
coarse, and American culture often very imperfect ; that the 
noblest examples of consummate training imply a leisure which 
we have not had, and are perhaps most easily produced where 
social advantages are more permanent than here, and the law 
heredity has a wider recognition. We all know, too well, how 
much of even vice and shame there has been, and is, in our 
national life ; how sluggish the public conscience has been be- 
fore sharpest appeals ; how corruption has entered high places 
in the government, and the blister of its touch has been upon 
laws, as well as on the acts of prominent officials. And we 
know the reckless greed and ambition, the fierce party spirit, 
the personal wrangles and jealous animosities, with which our 
Congress has been often dishonored,' at which the nation — 
sadder still — has sometimes laughed, in idiotic unreason. 

But knowing all this, and with the impression of it full on 
our thoughts, we may exult in the real, steady, and prophesy- 
ing growth of a better spirit toward dominance in the land. I 
scout the thought that we as a people are worse than our 
fathers ! John Adams, at the head of the War Department, in 
1776, wrote bitter laments of the corruption which existed in 
even that infant age of the Republic, and of the spirit of 



ORATION — REV. DR. R. S. STORRS. 307 

venality, rapacious and insatiable, which was then the most 
alarming enemy of America. lie declared himself ashamed of 
the age which he lived in ! In Jefferson's day, all Federalists 
expected the universal dominion of French infidelity. In 
Jackson's day, all Whigs thought the country gone to ruin 
already, as if Mr. Biddle had had the entire public hope locked 
up in the vaults of his terminated bank. In Polk's day, the 
excitements of the Mexican War gave life and germination to 
many seeds of rascality. There has never been a time — not 
here alone, in any country — -when the fierce light of incessant 
inquiry blazing on meu in public life, would not have revealed 
forces of evil like those we have seen, or when the condemna- 
tion which followed the discovery would have been sharper. 
And it is among my deepest convictions that, with all which 
has happened to debase and debauch it, the nation at large 
was never before more mentally vigorous or morally sound. 

Gentlemen : The demonstration is around us ! 

This city, if any place on the continent, should have been the 
one where a reckless wickedness should have had sure preva- 
lence, and reforming virtue the least chance of success. Start- 
ing in 1790 with a white population of less than thirty thousand 
— growing steadily for forty years, till that population had 
multiplied six-fold — taking into itself, from that time on, such 
multitudes of emigrants from all parts of the earth that the dic- 
tionaries of the languages spoken in its streets would make a 
library — all forms of luxury coming with wealth, and all means 
and facilities for every vice — the primary elections being the 
seed-bed out of which springs its choice of rulers, with the in- 
fluence which it sends to the public councils — its citizens so ab- 
sorbed in their pursuits that oftentimes, for years together, large 
numbers of them have left its affairs in hands the most of all 
unsuited to so supreme and delicate a trust — it might well have 
been expected that while its docks were echoing with a com- 
merce which encompassed the globe, while its streets were 
thronged with the eminent and the gay from all parts of the 
land, while its homes had in them uncounted thousands of 
noble men and cultured women, while its stately squares swept 
out year by year across new spaces, while it founded great in- 



308 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

stitutions of beneficence, and shot new spires upward toward 
Leaven, and turned the rocky waste to a pleasure ground famous 
in the earth, its government would decay, and its recklessness 
of moral ideas, if not as well of political principles would become 
apparent. 

Men have prophesied this, from the outset till now. The fear 
of it began with the first great advance of the wealth, population, 
and fame of the city ; and there have not been wanting facts in 
its history which served to renew, if not to justify the fear. 

But when the war of 1861 broke on the land, and shadowed 
every home within it, this city, — which had voted by immense 
majorities against the existing administration, and which was 
linked by unnumbered ties with the vast communities then 
rushing to assail it, — flung out its banners from window and 
spire, from City Hall and newspaper office, and poured its 
wealth and life into the service of sustaining the Government, 
with a swiftness and vehement energy that were never sur- 
passed. When, afterward, greedy and treacherous men, capable 
and shrewd, deceiving the unwary, hiring the skillful, and 
moulding the very law to their uses, had concentrated in their 
hands the government of the city, and had bound it in seem- 
ingly invincible chains, while they plundered its treasury, — it 
rose upon them, when advised of the facts, as Samson rose upon 
the Philistines ; and the two new cords that were upon his 
hands no more suddenly became as flax that was burnt than 
did those manacles imposed upon the city by the craft of the 
Ring. 

Its leaders of opinion to-day are the men — like him who pre- 
sides in our assembly — whom virtue exalts, and character 
crowns. It rejoices in a Chief Magistrate as upright and in- 
trepid in a virtuous cause, as any of those whom he succeeds. 
It is part of a State whose present position, in laws, and officers, 
and the spirit of its people, does no discredit to the noblest of 
its memories. And from these heights between the rivers, look- 
ing over the land, looking out on the earth to which its daily 
embassies go, it sees nowhere beneath the sun a city more 
ample in its moral securities, a city more dear to those who 
possess it, a city more splendid in promise and in hope. 



OKATION REV. DR. R. S. STORRS. 309 

What is true of the city is true, in effect, of all the land. Two 
things, at least, have been established by our national history, 
the impression of which the world will not lose. The one is, 
that institutions like ours, when sustained by a prevalent moral 
life throughout the nation, are naturally permanent. The othei 
is, that they tend to peaceful relations with other states. They 
do this in fulfillment of an organic tendency, and not through 
any accident of location. The same tendency will inhere in 
them, wheresoever established. 

In this age of the world, and in all the states which Christi- 
anity quickens, the allowance of free movement to the popular- 
mind is essential to the stability of public institutions. There 
may be restraint enough to guide, and keep such movement 
from premature exhibition. Bat there cannot be force enough 
used to resist it, and to reverse its gathering current. If there 
is, the government is swiftly overthrown, as in France so often, 
or is left on one side, as Austria has been by the advancing 
German people ; like the Castle of Heidelberg, at once palace 
and fortress, high -placed and superb, but only the stateliest ruiu 
in Europe, while the rail-train thunders through the tunnel be- 
neath it, and the Neckar sings along its near channel as if tower 
and tournament never had been. Revolution, transformation, 
organic change, have thus all the time for this hundred years been 
proceeding in Europe ; sometimes silent, but oftener amid 
thnnders of strieken fields ; sometimes pacific, but oftener with 
garments rolled in blood. 

In England the progress has been peaceful, the popular de- 
mands being ratified as law whenever the need became apparent. 
It has been vast, as well as peaceful ; in the extension of suf- 
frage, in the ever-increasing power of the Commons, in popular 
education. Chatham himself would hardly know his own Eng- 
land if he should return to it. The Throne continues, illustrated 
by the virtues of her who fills it ; and the ancient forms still 
obtain in Parliament. But it could not have occurred to him, 
or to Burke, that a century after the ministry of Grenville the 
emliarkation of the Pilgrims would be one of the prominent 
historical pictures on the panels of the lobby of the House of 
Lords, or that the name of Oliver Cromwell, and of Bradshaw, 



310 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

President of the High Court of Justice, would be cut iu the stone 
in Westminster Abbey, < >vei the places in which they were buried, 
and whence their decaying bodies were dragged to the gibbet 
and the ditch. England is now, as has been well said, " an 
aristocratic Republic, with a permanent Executive." Its only 
perils lie in the fact of that aristocracy, which, however, is flex- 
ible enough to endure, of that permanence in the Executive, 
which would hardly outlive one vicious Prince. 

What changes have taken place in France, I need not remind 
you, nor how uncertain is still its future. You know how the 
swift untiring wheels, of advance or reaction, have rolled this 
way and that, in Italy, and in Spain ; how Germany has had to 
be reconstructed ; how Hungary has had to fight and suffer for 
that just place in the Austrian councils which only imperial 
defeat surrendered. You know how precarious the equilibrium 
now is, in many states, between popular rights and princely 
prerogative ; what armies are maintained, to fortify govern- 
ments ; what fear of sudden and violent change, like an 
avalanche tumbling at the touch of a foot, perplexes nations^ 
The records of change make the history of Europe. The ex- 
pectation of change is almost as wide as the continent itself. 

Meanwhile, how permanent has been this Republic, which 
seemed at the outset to foreign spectators a mere sudden in- 
surrection, a mere organized riot! Its organic law, adopted 
after exciting debate, but arousing no battle and enforced by no 
army, has been interpreted, and peacefully administered, with 
one great exception, from the beginning. It has once been 
assailed, with passion and skill, with splendid daring and un- 
bounded self-sacrifice, by those who sought a sectional ad- 
vantage through its destruction. No monarchy of the world 
could have withstood that assault. It seemed as if the last fatal 
Apocalypse had come, to drench the land with plague and blood, 
and wrap it in a fiery gloom. The Republic, 

"pouring like the tide into a breach. 

"With ample anil brim fulness of its force." 

subdued the rebellion, emancipated the race which had been 
in subjection, restored the dominion of the old Constitution, 



ORATION RKV. DR. R. S. STORRS. 311 

amended its provisions in the contrary direction from that 
which had been so fiercely sought, gave it guaranties of en- 
durance while the continent lasts, and made its ensigns more 
eminent than ever in the regions from which they had been 
expelled. The very portions of the people which then sought 
its overthrow are now again its applauding adherents — the 
great and constant reconciling force, the tranquillizing Irenarch, 
being the freedom which it leaves in their hands. 

It has kept its place, this Republic of ours, in spite of the 
rapid expansion of the nation over territory so wide that the 
scanty strip of the original states is only as a fringe on its im- 
mense mantle. It has kept its place, while vehement debates, 
involving the profoundest ethical principles, have stirred to its 
depths the whole public mind. It has kept its place, while the 
tribes of mankind have been pouring upon it, seeking the shel- 
ter and freedom which it gave. It saw an illustrious President 
murdered, by the bullet of an assassin. It saw his place occu- 
pied as quietly by another as if nothing unforseeu or alarming 
had occurred. It saw prodigious armies assembled, for its 
defence. It saw those armies, at the end of the war, marching 
in swift and long procession up the streets of the Capital, and 
then dispersing into then* former peaceful citizenship, as if they 
had had no arms in their hands. The General before whose 
skill and will those armies had been shot upon the forces which 
opposed them, and whose word had been their military law, 
remained for three years an appointed officer of that govern- 
ment he had saved. Elected then to be the head of th#t govern- 
ment, and again re-elected by the ballots of his countrymen, in 
a few months more he will have retired, to be thenceforth a 
citizen like the rest, eligible to office, and entitled to vote, but 
with no thought of any prerogative descending to him, or to his 
children, from his great service and military fame. The Re- 
public, whose triumphing armies he led, will remember his 
name, and be grateful for his work ; but neither to him, nor to 
any one else, will it ever give sovereignty over itself. 

From the Lakes to the Gulf its will is the law, its dominion 
complete. Its centripetal and centrifugal forces are balanced, 
almost as in the astronomy of the heavens. Decentralizing 



^ 



312 ODE NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

authority, it puts his owu part of it into the hand of every 
citizen. Giving free scope to private enterprise, allowing not 
only, but accepting and encouraging, each movement of the 
public reason which is its only terrestrial rule, there is no threat, 
in all its sky, of division or downfall. It cannot be successfully 
assailed from within. It never will be assailed from without, 
with a blow at its life, while other nations continue sane. 

It has been sometimes compared to a pyramid, broad-based 
and secure, not liable to overthrow as is obelisk or column, by 
storm or age. The comparison is just, but it is not sufficient. 
It should rather be compared to one of the permanent features 
of nature, and not to any artificial construction : — to the river, 
which flows, like our own Hudson, along the courses that nature 
opens, forever in motion, but forever the same ; to the lake, 
which lies on common days level and bright in placid stillness, 
while it gathers its fullness from many lands, and lifts its waves 
in stormy strength when winds assail it ; to the mountain, which 
is shaped bv no formula of art, and which only rarely, in some 
supreme sun-burst, flushes with color, but whose roots the very 
earthquake cannot shake, and on whose brow the storms fall 
hurtless, while under its shelter the cottage nestles, and up its 
sides the gardens climb. 

So stands the Republic : 

Whole as the marble, founded as the rock, 
As broad and general as the casing air. 

Our government has been permanent, as established upon the 
old Declaration, and steadily sustained by the undecaying and 
moulding life in the soul of the nation. It has been peaceful, 
also, for the most part, in scheme and in spirit ; and has shown 
at no time such an appetite for war as has been familiar, within 
the century, in many lands. 

This may be denied, by foreign critics ; or at any rate be ex- 
plained, if the fact be admitted, by our isolation from other 
states, by our occupation jn peaceful labors, which have left no 
room for martial enterprise, perhaps by an alleged want in us 
of that chivalric and high-pitched spirit, -which is gladdened by 
danger and which welcomes the fray. I do not think the ex- 
planation sufficient, the analysis just 



ORATION REV. DR. R. S. STORRS. 313 

This people was trained to military effort, from its beginning. 
It bad in it tbe blood of Saxon and Norman, neither of whom 
was afraid of war ; the very same blood which a few years after 
was poured out like water at Marston Moor, and Naseby, and 
Dunbar. Ardor and fortitude were added to its spirit by 
those whose fathers had followed Coligni, by the children of those 
whomAlva and Parma could not conquer, or whom Gustavus 
hud inspired with his intense paramount will. With savages in 
the woods, and the gray wolf prowling around its cabins, the 
hand of this people was from the first as familiar with the gun- 
stock as with mattock or plough ; and it spent more time, in 
proportion to its leisure, it spent more life, in proportion to its 
numbers, from 1607 to 1770, in protecting itself against violent 
assault than was speut by France, the most martial of kingdoms, 
on all the bloody fields of Europe. 

Then came the Revolution, with its years of war, and its 
crowning success, to intensify, and almost to consecrate this 
spirit, and to give it distribution ; while, from that time, the 
nation has been taken into its substance abounding elements 
from aU the fighting peoples of the earth. The Irishman, who 
is never so entirely himself as when the battle-storm hurtles 
around him ; the Frenchman, who says " After you Gentle- 
men," before the infernal fire of Fontenoy ; the German, whose 
irresistible tread the world lately heard at Sadowa and Sedan 
— these have been entering represenatives of two of them en- 
tering by millions, into the Republic. If any nation, therefore, 
should have a fierce and martial temper, this is the one. If any 
people should keep its peaceful neighbors in fear, lest its 
aggression should smite their homes, it is a people born, and 
trained, and replenished like this, admitting no rule but its 
own will, and conscious of a strength whose annual increase 
makes arithmetic pant. 

What has been the fact ? Lay out of sight that late civil 
war which could not be averted, when once it had been threat- 
ened, except by the sacrifice of the government itself, and a 
wholly unparalleled public suicide, and how much of war with 
foreign powers has the century seen ? There has been a fre- 
quent crackle of musketry along the frontiers, as Indian tribes, 



314 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

which refused to be civilized, have slowly and fiercely retreated 
toward the "West. There was one war declared against 
Tripoli, in 1801, when the Kepublic took by the throat the 
African pirates to whom Europe paid tribute, and when the 
gallantry of the Preble and Decatur gave early distinction to 
our navy. There was a war declared against England, in 1812, 
when our seamen had been taken from under our Hag, from 
the decks of our national ships, and our commerce had been 
practically swept from the seas. There was a war affirmed 
already to exist in Mexico, in 1846, entered into by surprise, 
never formally declared, against which the moral sentiment of 
the nation rose widely in revolt, but which in its result added 
largely to our territory, opened to us California treasures, and 
wrote the names of Buena Vista and Monterey on our short 
annals. 

That has been our military history ; and if a People, as 
powerful and as proud, has anywhere been more peaceable 
also, in the last hundred years, the strictest research fails to 
find it. Smarting with the injury clone us by England during 
the crisis of our national peril, in spite of the remonstrances 
presented through that distinguished citizen who should have 
been your orator to-day — while hostile taunts had incensed our 
people, while burning ships had exasperated commerce, and while 
what looked like artful evasions had made statesmen indignant 
— with a half-million men who had hardly yet laid down their 
arms, with a navy never before so vast, or so fitted for service — 
when a war with England would have had the force of passion 
behind it, and would at any rate have shown to the world that 
the nation respects its starry flag, and means to have it secure 
on the seas — we referred all differences to arbitration, appointed 
commissioners, tried the cause at Geneva, with advocates, not 
with armies, and got a prompt and ample verdict. If Canada 
now lay next to Yorkshire it would not be safer from armed in- 
cursion than it is when divided by only a custom-house from 
all the strength of this Republic. 

The fact is apparent, and the reason not less so. A monar- 
chy, just as it is despotic, finds incitement to war; for pre- 
occupation of the popular mind ; to gratify nobles, officers, the 



ORATION REV. DR. R. S. STORKS. 315 

army ; for historic renown. An intelligent Republic hates 
war, and sliuns it. It counts standing armies a curse only 
second to an annual pestilence. It wants no glory bat from 
growth. It delights itself in arts of peace, seeks social enjoy- 
ment and increase of possessions, and feels instinctively that, 
like Israel of old, " its strength is to sit still." It cannot bear 
to miss the husbandman from the fields, the citizen from the 
town, the house-father from the home, the worshipper from 
the church. To change or shape other people's institutions is 
no part of its business. To force them to accept its scheme of 
government would simply contradict and nullify its charter. 
Except, then, when it is startled into passiun by the cry of a 
suffering under oppression which stirs its pulses into tumult, or 
when it is assailed in its own rights, citizens, property, it will 
not go to war ; nor even then, if diplomacy can find a remedy 
for the w T rong. " Millions for defence," said Coteswoitk Pinck- 
ney to the French Directory, when Talleyrand in their name 
had threatened him with war, "but not a cent for tribute." He 
might have added, " and not a dollar for aggressive strife." 

It will never be safe to insult such a nation, or to outrage its 
citizens ; for the reddest blood is in its veins, and some Cap- 
tain Iugraham may always appear, to lay his little sloop of war 
along-side the offending frigate, with shotted guns, and a 
peremptory summons. There is a way to make powder inex- 
plosive ; but, treat it chemically how you will, the dynamite 
will not stand many blows of the hammer. The detonating 
tendency is too permanent in it. But if left to itself, such a 
People will be peaceful, as ours has been. It will foster peace 
among the nations. It will tend to dissolve great permanent 
armaments, as the light conquers ice, and summer sunshine 
breaks the glacier which a hundred nip-hammers could only 
scar. The longer it continues, the more widely and effectively 
its influence spreads, the more will its benign example hasten 
the day, so long foretold, so surely coming, when 

The war drum throbs no longer, and the battle-flags are furled, 
In the Parliament of Man, the Federation of the World. 



BIG OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Mr. President: Fellow-Citizens: — To an extent too great for 
your patience, but with a rapid incompleteness that is only too 
evident as we match it with the theme, I have outlined be- 
fore you some of the reasons why we have right to commemo- 
rate the day whose hundredth anniversary has brought us to- 
gether, and why the paper then adopted has interest and 
importance not only for us, but for all the advancing sons of 
men. Thank God that he who framed the Declaration, and he 
who was its foremost champion, both lived to see the nation 
they had shaped growing to greatness, and to die together, in 
that marvelous coincidence, on its semi-centennial ! The fifty 
years which have passed since then have only still further hon- 
ored their work. Mr. Adams was mistaken in the day which he 
named as the one to be most fondly remembered. It was not 
that on which Independence of the empire of Great Britain was 
formally resolved. It was that on which the reasons were given 
which justified the act, and the principles were announced 
which made it of secular significance to mankind. But he would 
have been absolutely right in saying of the fourth day what he 
did say of the second: it " will be the most remarkable epoch in 
the history of America; to be celebrated by succeeding genera- 
tions as the great anniversary festival, commemorated as the 
day of deliverance, by solemn acts of devotion to Almighty God, 
from one end of the continent to the other." 

It will not be forgotten, in the land or in the earth, until the 
stars have fallen from their poise; or until our vivid morning- 
star of Republican liberty, not losing its lustre, has seen its 
special brightness fade in the ampler effulgence of a freedom 
universal ! 

But while we rejoice in that which is past, and gladly recog- 
nize the vast organific mystery of life which was in the Declara- 
tion, the plans of Providence which slowly and silently, but with 
ceaseless progression, had led the way to it, the immense and 
enduring results of good which from it have flowed, let us not 
forget the duty which always etpials privilege, and that of peo- 
ples, as well as of persons, to whomsoever much is given, shall 
only therefore the more be required. Let us consecrate our - 
selves, each one of us, hire, to the further duties which wait to 



ORATION — RKV. DR. R. S. STORRS. 317 

be fulfilled, to the work which shall consummate tk,» great work 
of the Fathers ! 

From scanty soils come richest grapes, and on severe and 
rocky slopes the trees are often of toughest fibre. The wines of 
Rudesheim and Johannisberg cannot be grown in the fatness of 
gardens, and the cedars of Lebanon disdain the levels of marsh 
and meadow. So a heroism is sometimes native to penury which 
luxury enervates, and the great resolution which sprang up in 
the blast, and blossomed under inclement skies, may lose its 
shapely and steadfast strength when, the air is all of summer 
softness. In exuberant resources is to be the coming American 
peril; in a swiftly increasing luxury of life. The old humility, 
hardihood, patience, are too likely too be lost when material 
success again opens, as it will, all avenues to wealth, and 
when its brilliant prizes solicit, as again they will, the national 
spirit. 

Be it ours to endeavor that that temper of the Fathers which 
was nobler than their work shall live in the children, and exalt 
to its tone their coming career; that political intelligence, pa- 
triotic devotion, a reverent spirit toward Him who is above, an 
exulting expectation of the future of the World, and a sense of 
our relation to it, shall be, as of old, essential forces in our pub- 
lic life; that education and religion keep step all the time with 
the Nation's advance, and the School and the Church be always 
at home wherever its flag shakes out its folds. In a spirit 
worthy the memories of the Past let us set ourselves to accom- 
plish the tasks which, in the sphere of national politics still 
await completion. We burn the sunshine of other years, when 
we ignite the wood or coal upoa our hearths. We enter a priv- 
ilege which ages have secured, in our daily enjoyment of politi- 
cal freedom. While the kindling glow irradiates our homes, 
let it shed its lustre on our spirit, and quicken it for its fur- 
ther work. 

Let us fight against the tendency of educated men to reserve 
themselves from politics, remembering that no other form of 
human activity is so grand or effective as that which affects, first 
the character, and then the revelation of character in the gov- 
ernment, of a great and free People. Let us make religious dis- 



318 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

sension here, as a force in politics, as absurd as witchcraft.* 
Let party names be nothing to us, in comparison with that 
costly and proud inheritance of liberty and of law, which parties 
exist to conserve and enlarge, which any party will have here to 
maintain if it would not be buried, at the next cross-roads, with 
a stake through its breast. Let us seek the unity of all sec- 
tions of the Republic, through the prevalence in all of mutual 
respect, through the assurance in all of local freedom, 
through the mastery in all of that supreme spirit which flashed 
from the lips of Patrick Henry, when "he said, in the first 
Continental Congress, " I am not a Virginian, but an Ameri- 
can." Let us take care that labor maintains its ancient place 
of privilege and honor, and that industry has no fetters im- 
posed, of legal restraint or of social discredit, to hinder its 
work or to lessen its wage. Let us turn, and overturn, in pub- 
lic discussion, in political change, till we secure a Civil Service, 
honorable, intelligent, and worthy of the land, in which capable 
integrity, not partisan zeal, shall be the condition of each pub- 
lic trust ; and let us resolve that whatever it may cost, of labor 
and of patience, of sharper economy and of general sacrifice, it 
shall come to pass that wherever American labor toils, wher- 
ever American enterprise plans, wherever American commerce 
reaches, thither again shall go as of old the country's coin — the 
American Eagle, with the encircling stars and golden plumes ! 
In a word, Fellow-Citizens, the moral life of the nation being 
ever renewed, all advancement and timely reform will come as 
comes the bourgeoning of the tree from the secret force which 
fills its veins. Let us each of us live, then, in the blessing and 
the duty of our great citizenship, as those who are conscious of 
unreckoned indebetedness to a heroic and prescient Past : — 

* Cromwell is sometimes considered a bigot. His rule on this subject 
is therefore the more worthy of record : " Sir, the State, in choosing men 
to serve it, takes no notice of their opinions ; if they be willing faithfully 
to serve it, that satisfies. * * Take heed of being sharp, or too easily 
sharpened by others, against those to whom you can object little, but that 
they square not with you in every opinion concerning matters of religion. 
If there be any other offence to be charged upon him, that must, in a 
judicial way, receive determination." — Letter to Mnjor-General Crawford, 
10th March, 1643. 



ORATION— REV. DR. R. S. STORRg. 319 

the grand and solemn lineage of whose freedom runs back 
beyond Bunker Hill or the Mayflower, runs back beyond muni- 
nients ;md memories of men, and has the majesty of far centu- 
ries on it ! Let us live as those for whom God hid a continent 
from the world, till He could open all its scope to the freedom 
and faith of gathered peoples, from many lands, to be a nation 
to His honor and praise ! Let us live as those to whom He 
commits the magnificent trust of blessing peoples many and 
far, by the truths which He has made our life, and by the his- 
tory which He helps us to accomplish. 

Such relation to a Past ennobles this transient and vanishing 
life. Such a power of influence on the distant and the Future, 
is the supremest terrestial privilege. It is ours if we will, in 
the mystery of that spirit, which has an immortal and a ubiqui- 
tous life. With the swifter instruments now in our hands, with 
the land compacted into one immense embracing home, with the 
world opened to the interchange of thought, and thrilling with 
the hopes that now animate its life, each American citizen has 
superb opportunity to make his influence felt afar, and felt for 
long ! 

Let us not be unmindful of this ultimate and inspiring lesson 
of the hour ! By all the memories of the Past, by all the im- 
pulse of the Present, by the noblest instincts of our own souls, 
by the touch of His sovereign spirit upon us, God make us 
faithful to the work, and to Him ! that so not only this city may 
abide, in long and bright tranquility of peace, when our eyes 
have shut forever on street, and spire, and populous square ; 
that so the land, in all its future, may reflect an influence from 
this anniversary ; and that, when another century has passed, 
the sun which then ascends the heavens may look on a world 
advanced and illumined beyond our thought, and here may be- 
hold the same great Nation, born of struggle, baptized into 
liberty, and in its second terrific tral purchased by blood, then 
expanded and multiplied till all the land blooms at its touch, 
and still one in its life, because still pacific, Christian, free! 



SONG OF 1876. 

BY BAYARD TAYLOR. 

WIRTTEN FOR THE NEW YORK CELEBRATION, JULY 4, 1876. 

Waken, voice of the Land's Devotion ! 

Spirit of freedom, awaken all ! 
Ring, ye shores, to the Song of Ocean, 
Rivers, answer, and mountains, call 1 

The golden day has come ; 

Let every tongue be dumb 
That sounded its malice or murmered its fears; 

She hath won her story ; 

She wears her glory ; 
We crown her the Land of a Hundred Tears I 

Out of darkness and toil and danger 

Into the light of Victory's day — 
Help to the weak and Home to the stranger, 
Freedom to all, she hath held her way ! 

Now Europe's orphans rest 

Upon her mother's breast ; 
The voices of nations are heard in the cheers 

That shall cast upon her 

New love and honor, 
And crown her the Queen of a Hundred Years ! 

North and South, we are met as brothers; 

East and West, we are wedded as one ! 
Right of each shall secure our mother's — 
Child of each is her faithful son ! 
We give thee heart and hand, 
Our glorious native land, 
For battle has tried thee, and time endears; 
We will write thy story, 
And keep thy glory 
As pure as of old for a Thousand Years ! 



DEMOCRACY, THE HOPE OF THE NATION. 

AN ORATION BY HON. FERNANDO WOOD, 

DELIVERED AT TAMMANY HALL, NEW YORK CITY, JULY 4tH, 1876. 

As one of the sons of revolutionary ancestors, whose blood 
was shed upon the battle fields of their country, I am proud to 
be here to-day. 

This day is hallowed by sacred memories. It marks an epoch 
in the period of time which proved more productive to humaD 
development than any other but one since the creation of man. 
It was second in importance only to the appearance on earth of 
the Divine Master. After a century's duration, tried by fire 
and sword, by pestilence and famine, by internal convulsion, 
and by the ever changing vicissitudes of party and sectional 
conflict, we emerge to-day from all the dangers and trials of the 
past, brighter, stronger and greater than any other people on 
earth of one individuality. Who is not proud to be an Ameri- 
can? Lives there to-day, anywhere, a man of any station in 
life, of any order of intelligence, of any sojourn in any other 
climes, of any creed or faith, of any political opinions, of any 
section, who does not stand more erect and bear himself more 
lofty, when able to say that he is an American citizen, one of 
the people of this blessed land. Nor is this claim founded upon 
mere self-laudation. The government and people of other 
nationalities concede and recognize it. It is universally ac- 
cepted, and to be an American is of itself so high an honor that 
it affords a passport to distinction everywhere. The United 
States of to-day is the one and only great republic. It is the 
one and only land of perfect freedom. It is the one and only 
nationality with power sufficiently consolidated to prove effec- 
tive in maintaining its integrity, and also with free opinion so 
diffused as to afford all men equality under the laws in the en- 
joyment of life, liberty and happiness. Our territory, stretched 
from ocean to ocean, commands both seas, which nearly encir. 



$22 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

cle a vast continent; our numbers are equal to forty-five mil- 
lions; internal tranquility is established, and our external rela- 
tions to other governments of commanding strength and sensi- 
tive honor such as none would deem it prudent to offend. 
Within our jurisdiction, living peacefully and happy, may be 
found men of opposite creeds, of all nativities, of every lan- 
guage and diversified interests, with no disposition to encroach 
upon each other's rights, and no fear of Government interfer- 
ence. Thus we form a solid political community, united in all 
the essential requisites of national power, with one government, 
and yet with many governments. As a people we recognize and 
protect each other, contribute in common towards the general 
welfare, and support in common the general burdens. "Where 
exists our superior — or rather where exists our peer ? Though 
young in years we are among the oldest in form of government 
of the Christian nations of the world. Few in Europe that 
have not changed either their dynasty or the character of their 
rule within the century. Within the period of our nationality, 
France has been a monarchy, an empire and a republic. Ger- 
many has been a combination of discordant, petty monarchies, 
and now an empire. Italy has been a collection of disintegra- 
ted states and dukedoms, and now a kingdom. Poland, Sar- 
dinia, Naples and other monarchies have ceased and become 
extinct. 

A century ago the government of England was exercised by 
the sovereign ; it is now practically vested in the popular branch 
of Parliament. The crown remains, but the House of Com- 
mons governs in its power to compel a change of ministry, 
which is the actual executive authority. 

Spain has alternated between anarchy, republicism and mon- 
archy. O her nations of Europe have been partitioned or dis- 
membered, have undergone the infliction of foreign control or 
been subjected to the caprice or ambition of more powerful 
neighbors, whilst the United States has maintained intact the 
integrity, solidity and formulas of her original creation, firmly 
adhering to popular liberty, standing proud and defiant to all 
outside attempts at interference, never compromising her 
honor, never shi-inking from an assertion of entire indepen- 



ORATION FERNANDO WOOD. 323 

dence of all other nations, and at all times commanding respect 
abroad and lier autonmpny at home. Thus was she originally 
established, and thus has she maintained herself — a republic 
for the whole period of her existence, one hundred years to- 
day. Now, my Mends, in contemplating this fact can we fail 
to remember those illustrious men who laid the foundation so 
broad and deep upon which has been erected this splendid 
structure ? Is it within the compass of human thought to 
dwell upon our present greatness, and forget those to whom 
we are indebted for it? Go with me back to the American 
Revolution — yet further back to those momentous events 
which preceded that terrible struggle. Remember those poor 
colonists, who had mostly sought a refuge from either political 
or religious oppression at home on this cold and inhospitable 
shore ; see the reception the savage gave them, the struggle 
with the elements, the impoverished settlements, the depriva- 
tion and neglect which followed, the final lodgments of detached 
and far separated populations, the struggling communities, the 
destitution and horrible events incident to border life, far re- 
moved from any of the facilities of either defensive protection 
or means of continued existence, and the final formation of but 
a pro forma government, with the name but without its essen- 
tial requirements. Thus we bring them down to the middle 
of the eighteenth century. They had persevered, and had 
conquered the savage on the seaboard, had increased in popu- 
lation, procured some trade and commerce, and attracted the 
notice of their European masters. But this notice was not in 
the interest of their advantage and progress. It was rather 
that notice by which avarice sees and covets the accumulations 
of a poor or dependent neighbor. It was the same spirit of 
protection that the wolf gives to lambs when he covers and 
devours them. 

Exactions were imposed, representation in the Home Gov- 
ernment was denied, humble petitions were treated with con- 
tempt, remonstrances were held to be treasonable, more troops 
were ordered across the ocean to overawe and to command obe- 
dience, and the hand of despotism laid its mailed glove upon 
the spirits and almost crushed pride of the colonists, who found 



324 OtJK NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

in their mother country a more terrible foe than they had origin- 
ally encountered in the native barbarity of the American Indian. 
The people became gloomy, and looked on with forebodings, a 
few whispered of oppression, some went so far as to speak out 
in condemnation of the new burdens imposed, but it was only 
when the Home Government proceeded to carry out its edicts 
and to prepare for their compulsory enforcement, that the rebel- 
lion became imminent. A long, deep murmur ran along the 
Atlantic shore from the far east to the southern extremity. Here 
and there a popular gathering gave vent to the too long pent up 
indignation. Here and there a prominent man spoke out, as did 
Patrick Henry in the provincial council of Virginia, when he ex- 
claimed, that as for him, " give him hberty or give him death.'' 

A general colonial congress was called to assemble at Phila- 
delphia. Every colony sent its representative to sit in council 
and to determine the great questions which the crisis appeared 
to call for — and what a council, and what a gathering. Here 
was Jefferson, the great founder of the pure Democracy, whose 
precepts furnished the underlying strata upon which rests the 
genius of our institutions, and which established the guide to our 
political faith and the only rehable beacon-light to our national 
liberty and glory. 

And now let me pause a moment to refer more especially to 
this illustrious personage. In him were blended all the attributes 
which go to make up the truly great man. He possessed a pe- 
culiar combination of rare qualities. We often find a strong in- 
tellectual development connected with a defective temperament ; 
personal courage is frequently clouded by want of moral consci- 
ousness, but it is not often that the moral, mental and physical 
qualities exist in their highest order in the same individual, all 
evenly balanced and alike alive and active, giving force and 
power,prominence and overtowering altitude to him who possesses 
them. But these were found in Jefferson — he stands out among 
the fathers of our system as the one head ; he had, it is true, as- 
sociates and assistants, but he was the master who devised 
framed, planned and executed the mighty work itself. Armed 
revolutions may overturn old governments, but it is only the 
philosophy of the statesman that can make new ones. But for 



I 



OKATION FEKNANDO WOOD. 325 

Jefferson, all the military successes of Washington might have 
produced but barren results. It was he who had thought out 
the work to be done, how to do it, and what should follow after 
it was done. It was not war and war alone that produced a 
successful revolution. It was not war at all that constructed 
our Government. 

Before a Continental army existed, and before Washington 
was brought from his country home, on the banks of the 
Potomac, to lead the troops, this Republic was born in the con- 
ception of the genius, the patriotism and the courage of Thomas 
Jefferson. He was not a military man, nor a military hero, but 
the chosen instrument of the Almighty, in whose brain and 
heart had been infused the peaceful spirit of God itself, 
who had brought order out of chaos in the great universe, so 
Jefferson formtd and massed the heterogenous elements of 
disunited colonies into one grand national Republic. Nor was 
this the only work of Jefferson. It became his dut} r , not only 
to create the State, but to provide also the means of its con- 
tinuance. As he had designed and executed the first steps 
towards its formation, in the Declaration of Independence, and 
had followed this with a form of Federal union, he saw that 
something more than these were required. He knew that states, 
however free, may become despotic ; that governments, though 
born in revolution, imbued with a spirit of liberty, may die in 
anarchy. It was not enough for him that he had aided in the 
creation of a free people ; he saw that it was necessary to main- 
tain that freedom. With this holy thought, that the freed 
colonies, whose political characters had been changed from 
vassalage to that of independence, he formed and established a 
political organization, which through its popular action should 
operate as a safeguard against attempts to reenslave the people, 
through monarchical tendencies or partisan deceptions. Hence 
was formed the Democratic party. In his brain was conceived 
this blessed combination. He was the author and sole arbitor 
of its fortunes during his life, and his spirit has watched over 
and protected it ever since. Its mission was to secure to pos- 
terity the full enjoyment of the blessings obtained in the Amer- 
ican Revolution. 



32G OUK NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

As popular opinion was to govern through the people's re- 
presentatives, it was necessary to educate, to instruct, to con- 
solidate and to make effective at the polls a just sentiment, a 
correct estimate of public questions, and a strict adherence to 
the true theory of government, upon which our institutions were 
originally founded. For this reason and to this end and pur- 
pose did Jefferson establish the Democratic party in 1802. 
He saw the old monarchial despotism striving through the 
efforts of demagogues to regain ascendency by the organ- 
ization of a Federal party, headed by the selfish intrigues of 
ambitious aspirants to popular favor. To combat this, and to 
perpetuate oar liberties, he sent out a note of warning and 
issued a second declaration, another proclamation of determined 
resistance, and a reminder of the glorious work which had been 
performed in 1770. This was the origin and the object of our 
organization. 

How glorious was the thought — but how more glorious has 
been its lifetime and history. I have said that it was a proud 
title — that of American citizenship, to be one of this body of 
American citizens, audi now add it is yet a higher honor to be 
able to say in addition, I am a member of the National Demo- 
cratic party, have always upheld its principles and supported 
its candidates. All that go to make this nation's greatness has 
been the work of that party, and to it and it alone may be 
traced Mie wonderful progress, the steady patriotism and the 
only adherence to the original intentions of the fathers of the 
Constitution, which has served to maintain the Union and se- 
cure its benefits. Such has been its history in the past, and as 
such it stands to-day. Amid unexampled trials and struggles 
it still lives. Its mission is but partially accomplished. Its 
destiny and work is still before us. As yet nothing has shaken 
the solidity of its organization. During the late civil war it 
was maintained intact, and though then thrown into a minority 
in the Government, it nevertheless had at the end of that war 
sufficient force and vitality to operate as a barrier to the at- 
tempted fanatical absorption of all the power in the Govern- 
ment, and the conversion of constitutional liberty into a narrow 
partisan despotism. 



ORATION— FERNANDO WOOD. 327 

It is now the imperative duty of all good men to combine in 
one common effort to secure the ascendency of the Democratic 
party to power in the national Government. 

Let us give to the canvass our best energies. Let us allay 
all intestine differences ; let us throw ourselves into the contest 
with all the courage, tenacity, and resolution which so great a 
cause has the right to command from every lover of his 
country. 



THE GRANDEUR OF OUR REPUBLIC. 

AN ORATION BY RICHARD O'GORMAN, 

DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION, AT IRVING HALL, NEW 
YORK, JULY 4th, 1876. 

I esteem myself much honored, citizens, in being allowed to 
participate in your festival to-day. I know that there is no 
need of my speaking to you. I know well that what I am able 
to say can add little- or nothing to the grace and splendor of 
this occasion. 

It seems to me, citizens, as if to-day were not like other days. 
Men's voices have in them a more genial, a more hearty ring; 
men's looks are more cheerful and friendly. A thousand ban- 
ners float upon the breeze. From a thousand church steeples 
the chimes ring out their melody on the throbbing air. In a 
thousand stately houses of prayer anthems peal and hymns of 
praise ascend to heaven. These are the voices of the great city, 
the signs and symbols by which it strives to give utterance to 
the sentiments of pride, praise, and exultation with which its 
million hearts are jubilant to-day. 

And in all this tumult, this tempest of enthusiasm, there is 
neither affectation nor exaggeration, nor excess. For the event 
we celebrate is a great event — great a hundred years ago, great 
to-day, and to be great and memorable in the time to come, 
when you and I shall all have passed away and the memory 
of us shall have perished from the earth. 

In other countries I have seen national festivals splendidly 
kept. There they know well the virtue of preserving a nation's 
traditions and allying its present, as far as may be, with whatever 
of pride and honor belong to its past. And yet, the events they 
commemorated were of merely local interest, and awakened but 
limited and partial sympathies — some hard-fought battles won — 
some enemy's city taken and sacked — some smiling land made 
desolate — some hostile race subdued. But such achievements 



ORATION RICHARD O GORMAN. 829 

triumphantly celebrated by the conqueror, were to the conquer- 
ed only memories of defeat and agony and humiliation. What 
was a holiday to one people was a day of woe and mourning 
to another. 

In the day we celebrate, there is, thank God, no sorrow — over 
its clear sky comes no cloud. Its memories are undimmed by a 
single tear. There is no man of any race or creed or nation 
or color under the sun who, looking back on the deed done here 
in America a hundred years ago, can truly say that it wrought 
wrong or ill to him or his — no man who can deny that it was 
well done, and a deed wise and beneficial to all mankind. 

You have all read the Declaration of Independence ; you 
have it by heart ; you have heard it read to-day. A hundred 
years ago it was a new revelation, startling with new terror 
kings on their thrones, and bidding serfs in their poor huts arise 
and take heart, and look up, with new hope of deliverance. It 
asserted that all men, kings and peasants, master and servant, 
rich and poor, were born equal with equal rights, inheritors of 
equal claim to protection from the law ; that governments de- 
rived their just powers, not from conquest or force, but from 
the consent of the governed, and existed only for their protec- 
tion and to make them happy. These were the truths eternal, 
but long unspoken ; truths that few dared to utter, which Pro- 
vidence ordained, should be revealed here in America, to be the 
political creed of the peoples all over the earth. Like a trumpet 
blast blown in the night, it pealed through the dark abodes of 
misery and aroused men to thought and hope and action. 

France caught the sound and awoke and tore off the tattered 
trappings from feudalism, and trampled the decrepit thing under 
her feet. Greece, dreaming of Marathon and Thermopylae, 
shook off her long lethargy, caught up again sword and shield, 
beat back, as of old, Asia and barbarism, and consecrated anew 
to freedom the Home of Athene, the fair land of the olive and 
the vine. To Poland, Hungary, Belgium, Italy, the summons 
was carried on the western winds. Even England herself found 
in the protest of her rebel colonies the forgotten lesson of her 
own liberties, and in the success of rebel arms the dearest rights 
of her own people were saved. 



SIJO OUH NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

And that trumpet blast still is pealing and will peal, still sum- 
mons whatever of manhood remains in mankind to assert itself. 
Still, at that sound the knees of tyrants "will be loosened with 
fear, and the hopes of freemen will rise and their hearts beat 
faster and higher as long as this round earth hangs poised in 
air, and men live upon it whose souls are alive with memories of 
the past. 

The Declaration of American Independence was a declaration 
of war witb Great Britain, of war to the knife, and the knife to 
the hilt. There were fearful odds against the Colonies when 
they threw down the gage of battle. On one side was England 
— strong in consciousness of wealth and power, strong in the 
prestige of sovereignty, fully armed and equipped for war, in- 
solent, haughty, scorning even to entertain the idea of possible 
check or defeat. On the other side, the Thirteen Colonies, 
stretching, for the most part, along the seaboard, vulnerable 
at a hundred points, and open to attack by sea and land, with- 
out army, without navy, without money or ammunition or ma- 
terial of war, having for troops only crowds of undisciplined 
citizens who had left for a while, plough and anvil, and hurried 
to the front with what arms they could lay hands on to fight 
the veterans of King George, skilled in their terrible trade by 
long service in European wars. 

On the second of July, 1776, the Continental Congress was 
in session in Philadelphia. There were about forty-nine dele- 
gates present. That day was a day of gloom. The air was 
dark and heavy with ill news ; ill news from the North — Mont- 
gomery had fallen at Quebec, and the expedition against 
Canada, had miserably failed. The lakes were all open to 
British ships, and a dusky cloud of savages, armed and enlisted 
in the name of the King, was gathering in the west, threatening 
at any moment to burst on the defenceless land in a storm of 
havoc and slaughter and devastation, compared with which the 
ordinary horrors of war were acts of mercy. Ill news from the 
South — a fleet of British-men-of-war had crossed the bar at 
Charleston, South Carolina. All during the long summer's day 
they had been pouring shot and shell upon the little forts, 
where Moultrie and Marion and William Jasper were sullenly 



ORATION RICHARD o'GORMAN. 331 

returning shot for shot. And now the night was come, and 
from steeple and house-top the citizens of Charleston 
watched flash after flash and prayed for dawn to give them 
light to see if the defiant flag of freedom was still there. 

Ill news from New York — Lord Howe's ships were riding in 
the Lower Bay, and a British army of thirty thousand men 
menaced the city with attack. In New York city, counsels 
were wavering and uncertain. Persons of rank, and wealth, 
and culture, were for the most part on the side of the crown, 
and longed to see the " Union Jack" again floating above them. 
The Continental forces in New York did not exceed 7,500 men. 
Even among them there was disaffection. Treachery was at 
work. A plot had been discovered to take the life of the com- 
mander-in-chief, and some of his body guard had been hanged 
for it. From all sides came ill tidings. Everywhere doubt 
and suspicion and despondency. It was a dark and gloomy 
time, when even the boldest might well be forgiven for losing 
heart. 

Such was the hour when Congress entered upon the consid- 
eration of the great question, on which hung the fate of a con- 
tinent. There were some who clung still to British connection. 
The King might relent — conciliation was not impossible — a 
monarchial form of government was dear to them. The past of 
England was their past, and they loth to lose it. 

Then war was a terrible alternative. They saw the precipice 
and they shuddered and started back appalled. But on the 
other side, were the men of the hour — the men of the people, 
who listened to the voice of the people, and felt the throbbing of 
the people's great heart. They, too, saw the precipice. Their 
eyes fathomed all the depth of the black abyss, but they saw be- 
yond the glorious vision of the coming years. They saw count- 
less happy homes stretching far and wide across a continent, 
wherein should dwell for ages, generation after generation of 
men nurtured in strength and virtue, and prosperity by the light 
and warmth of freedom. Remember, that between the thirteen 
colonies there were then but few ties. 

They differed in many things ; in race, religion, climate, pro- 
ductions, and habits of thought, as much then as they do now. 



382 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

One grand purpose alone knit their souls together, North to 
South, Adams of Massachusetts to Jefferson of Virginia. The 
holy purpose of building up here, for them and thuir children, 
a free nation, to be die example, the model, the citadel of free- 
dom, or, failing in that, to die and be forgotten, or remembered 
only with the stain of rebellion on their names. The counsel 
of these brave and generous men prevailed. Some light from 
the better world illumined their souls and strengthened their 
hearts. Behind them surged and beat the great tide of popu- 
lar enthusiasm. The people, ever alive to heroic purpose ; the 
people, whose honest instincts are often the wisest statesman- 
ship ; the people waited but for the word ; ready to fight, 
ready to die if need be for independence. And so God's will 
was done upon the earth. 

The word was spoken, the "Declaration" was uttered that 
gave life and name to the " United States of America," and a 
new nation breathed and looked into the future, daring all the 
best or the worst that future might bring. If that declaration 
became a signal of rescue and relief to countries far away, what 
word can describe the miracles it has wrought for this people 
here at home. It was a spell, a talisman, an armor of proof, 
and a sword of victory. The undisciplined throng of citizen 
soldiers, taught in the stern school of hardship and reverse, 
soon grew to be a great army, before which the veterans of 
Britain recoiled. 

Europe, surprised into sympathy with rebellion, sent her best 
and bravest here to right the battle of freedom, and Lafayette 
of France, De Kalb of Germany, Kosciusko of Poland, and 
their compeers, drew their bright swords in the ranks of the 
young republic. Best support of all, was that calm, fearless, 
steadfast soul, which, undismayed in the midst of peril and dis- 
aster, undaunted amid wreck and ruin, stood like a tower, re- 
flecting all that was best and noblest in the character of the 
American people, and personifying its resolute will. Happy 
is that nation to whom, in its hour of need, bountiful heaven 
provides a leader so brave and wise, so fitted to guide and 
rule, as was in that early crisis of the American republic its 
foremost man — George Washington. 



ORATION RICHARD o'GORMAN. 333 

Thus, from the baptism of blood, the young nation came 
forth purified, triumphant, free. Then the mystic influence, the 
magic of her accomplished freedom, began to work, and the 
thoughts of men, and the powers of earth and air and sea be- 
gan to do her bidding, and cast their treasures at her feet. 

From the thirteen parent Colonies, thirty-eight great States 
and Territories have been born. At first a broad land of forest 
and prairie stretched far and wide, needing only the labor of 
man to render it fruitful. Men came — across the Atlantic, 
breasting its storms, sped mighty fleets, carrying hither bri- 
gades and divisions of the grand army of labor. On they 
came, in columns, mightier than ever a king led to battle — in 
columns, millions strong, to conquer a continent, not to havoc 
and desolation, but to fertility and wealth, and order, and hap- 
piness. 

They came from field and forest in the noble German land — 
from where amid cornfield and vineyard, and flowers, the lordly 
Ehine flows proudly toward the sea. From Ireland — from 
heath-covered hill and grassy valley — from where the giant 
cliffs stand as sentinels for Europe, meet the first shock of the 
Atlantic and hurl back its surges broken and shattered in foam. 
From France and Switzerland, from Italy and Sweden, from all 
the winds of heaven, they came ; and as their battle line ad- 
vanced, the desert fell back subdued, and in its stead sprang 
up corn and fruit, the olive and the vine, and gardens that blos- 
somed like the rose. 

Of triumphs like these, who can estimate the value. The 
population of three millions a hundred years ago has risen to 
forty-five millions to-day. We have great cities, great manu- 
factures, great commerce, great wealth, great luxury and splen- 
dor. Seventy -four thousand miles of railway conquer distance, 
and make all our citizens neighbors to one another. All these 
things are great and good, and can be turned to good. But 
they are not all. Whatever fate may befall this Republic, 
whatever vicissitudes or disasters may be before her, this praise, 
at least, can never be denied to her, this glory she has won 
forever, that for one hundred years she has been hospitable and 
generous ; that she gave to the stranger a welcome — opened 



334 DUE NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

to him all the treasures of her liberty, gave him free scope for 
all his ability, a free career and fair play. 

And this, it is, that most endears this republic to other na- 
tions, and has made fast friends for her in the homes of the peo- 
ples all over the earth. Not her riches nor her nuggets of gold, 
nor her mountains of silver, nor her prodigies of mechanical 
skill, great and valuable though these things be. It is this, 
that most of all makes her name beloved and honored; that she 
has always been broad and liberal in her sympathies; that she 
has given homes to the homeless, land to the landless; that 
she has secured for the greatest number of those who have 
dwelt on her wide domain, a larger measure of liberty and 
peace and happiness, and for a greater length of time than has 
ever been enjoyed by any other people on this earth. For this, 
the peoples all over the earth, and through all time, will call 
this republic blessed. 

Vicissitudes the United States has had and will have. Neither 
man nor nation is exempt from error and passion and sin, nor 
from the sorrows that sin and passion are sure to entail. It is 
not given to man nor to nation to escape the drinking of that 
bitter cup. But look to other countries. Look to the history 
of Europe for the last hundred years, and say if Europe has not 
undergone disasters more severe than ours. Think of all her 
wars, insurrections and revolutions. The streets of her fair 
cities bristling with barricades and slippery with blood. Her 
society divided into hostile camps, labor in wretchedness and 
rags, eyeing with jealousy and aversion idleness in wealth, lux- 
ury and splendor. 

There, frauds in high places are covered up and concealed. 
Here, there is no man so high that the arm of the law can not 
reach him, or the lightning of public opinion strike and wither 
him with its scorn. There, eight millions of armed men eat the 
substance of its people and menace its industry and repose with 
fear of change, fear of new convulsion and new wars. Here, 
no foreign foe can hurt us. This republic could hold her own 
against the rest of the world in arms. 

"We have passed through the terrible ordeal of civil war. 
That calamity in which other republics have miserably perished 



ORATION — RICHARD o'cORMAN. 335 

lias befallen us. This republic has not perished. Its life, its 
liberty have survived. Still a written Constitution, assented to 
by the people, is the supreme law, the great charter of the land. 
The right of free discussion is preserved. We have a free press, 
under whose fearless and ceaseless scrutiny no crime can re- 
main long undiscovered, no conspiracy long undetected, no se- 
cret undevulged, no public offender go long unwhipped of justice. 

The storm is past. The great deluge has subsided. The 
means still remain to us by which we can restore what should be 
restored, redress, reconstruct, and reform. And do not doubt, 
citizens, but that in the revolution which is past, spite of all its 
losses, and they have been grievous, great good has been achive- 
ed. No convulsion so great has ever tortured and torn society 
without leaving some gain behind. 

Let us frankly and thankfully accept that good. Let us va- 
lue it all the more for the great price we have paid for it and 
must still pay. The Union is saved, not only saved, but firmer, 
stronger than ever. For a century to come no man will be in- 
sane enough to dream of the possibility of its dissolution. That 
danger i^ past. The blow which threatened to dissolve and shat- 
ter it, has but welded it together into harder and more compact 
stolidity. It remains to us, citizens, to make that union not only a 
firm, but a happy union — happy for South as for North, for 
West as for East ; not a union of force and fear and distrust, 
but a union of friendship and mutual confidence ; not a fetter 
of iron to bind the hands, but a wreath of flowers to chain the 
affections and delight the heart. Slavery exists no more in the 
United States ! The civil war has swept it away forever. That 
ancient cause of quarrel can disturb us no more. The debate is 
closed. The question is gone into judgment, from which there 
is no appeal. It is written forever in the Constitution, and in all 
things the Constitution must be respected and obeyed. 

These gains the civil war has brought with it. Of the losses 
it has entailed I do not care to say much to-day. The occasion 
is not fitting — on this day no word of sadness should be uttered, 
no word of anger, no word that tastes of the bitterness of mere 
faction. To-day we are all Americans — proud of our great re- 
public, proud of its past, hopeful of its future. 



336 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Let other men on other days tell you of the nation's errors 
and her faults. That there have been faults, drawbacks, contra- 
dictions, prejudices, and follies to be deplored no one can deny. 
He that searches for these things will find them in the doings of 
every people. Stand on the bank of any great river and trace 
its course and you will see its babbling shallows, its rough cata- 
racts, its dark, deep, and treacherous pools. You will see eddies, 
where the stream seems to flow back upon itself — you will see it 
as it comes from among cities — from the marts of commerce, 
turbid, disfigured, and soiled. But go to a distance, ascend some 
eminence where a broader view can be obtained. Look at the 
river then. It flows like a ribbon of silver under the sun, follow- 
ing always its destined course to the sea, broad, deep, resistless, 
bearing on its breast, health and wealth and happiness to man. 

So it is with this republic. There is in it no wrong that may 
not be righted, no stain that may not be removed, no loss that 
may not be repaired, no sorrow that, in time, may not be for- 
given and forgotten. I have faith in time. Complete reconcilia- 
tion between friends, once estranged, may be slow in coming, 
but it will come at last. The waves will heave and toss for a 
while, though the great storm be over and the winds be still, 
but calm will come, the sky will clear and God's blessed sun 
shine out at last. With us here, the time, too, will come, when 
men will take shame to be called " Northern men," or " South- 
ern " or " Eastern " or Western men." We are all Americans. 
He robs himself of honor who chooses a narrower title. 

And now the first 100 years of the nation's life are over. The 
first stage in the journey is accomplished. Behind us lies the 
past. Look back at it, it is a glorious past ; full of good, full 
of honor, full of benificence to all mankind. Look back at it 
with pride. We turn to the path before us — the future — what 
shall it be ? It is for you, citizens, to answer. The power to 
mould and govern that future is in your own hands. You have 
the ballot. Use it wisely ; use it honestly. Better weapon was 
never yet in freemen's hands. Preserve that weapon always 
with jealous care. Keep the right of free suffrage at all hazards, 
for in the hour that right is surrendered, the democratic 
Republic dies. 



ORATION RICHARD o'GORMAN. 337 

There are dangers before the Republic and around it. Ail 
life is full of danger. I have striven to tell you how, in the great 
days of old, the fathers of the Republic, spite of great dangers, 
laid its foundations broad and deep. They had selfishness to 
counteract, ambitions to watch, treachery to defeat. They had 
plots and conspiracies to guard against, the unwisdom of those 
who were honest, and the intrigues of those that were not honest. 
There were men among them, as there are among us, timid and 
faint of heart, who despaired of the Republic. In spite of all 
these, and a thousand other obstacles, the American people, a 
hundred years ago, achieved American Independence. You are 
inheritors of all their honors ; you enjoy the benefits of their 
success. It cannot be that you can fail in the easier task of 
preserving the nation they made. A great issue is soon to be 
tried before you. Even now two great parties are at your feet, 
each soliciting your favor, claiming your confidence and asking 
you to confide to its hands rule over the Republic, and the con- 
trol of all its patronage and power. All this, citizens, is yours 
to give. On you rests now all the responsibility. Think well 
how you decide, for on your judgment may depend the future 
of your Republic. 

I do not address you to-day as a partisan. In an hour like 
this we stand above the level of party. Parties are the people's 
servants, bound to carry out the people's will. Sometimes parties 
come into existence only to fulfill some special mission, and that 
mission accomplished, they die of their own success, or lag su- 
perfluous on the stage, and stop the way of progress. Some 
parties seem fitted to conduct war — others to guide the nation in 
the ways of peace. But the sure and unfailing test by which the 
capacity of , any party for future usefulness can be ascertained, 
is found in careful study of its conduct in the past. Party plat- 
forms are of little value ; party promises are easily made and easi- 
ly broken. Words may deceive, deeds tell the truth. By their 
fruits you shall know them. 

Apply the test to our own case. For fifteen years one great 
party has had possession of the Government of this nation — of 
this period four years were spent in war, which was, it is claim- 
ed, vigorously prosecuted and brought to a successful end — all 



338 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

the credit that may be due to this party for this achievement it 
deserves, and it has had it ; it has received besides in honors 
and emoluments an ample and generous recompense. For all 
this, it has had its reward. But in the eleven years of peace 
that have passed since that war ceased, what account can it give 
of its stewardship ? During all that period it has been absolute 
master of the Republic and of all its resources. It has levied 
taxes as it pleased, and spent them as it pleased. No party op- 
position has been strong enough to check its action. It has 
been omnipotent and supreme. 

Now, citizens, look at the result. Is any man satisfied with 
it ? Is it not time to ask this party, in whose hands you have 
placed the Government for the last eleven years of peace, why 
accumulating misfortunes oppress the land ? This is not a ques- 
tion of party. It is a question for the nation. It affects your 
homes, your dearest interests, the interests of your wives and 
children. Do not allow yourselves to be diverted from it. 

Eloquent orators will address you. They will appeal to your 
prejudices and strive to arouse your passions. Beware of them. 
Prejudice and passion are unsafe guides — false lights that lure 
men into ruin. Trust rather to your own reason, to your own 
strong common sense, and to the clear light which heaven has 
set in your own hearts. 

What policy does the people of the United States desire in 
the Government of the future ? As to this, I think good people 
of all parties are nearly agreed. The people wish that henceforth 
the Government, throughout all the land, shall be a Government, 
not of force, but of law — law lawfully executed and honestly ad- 
ministered — that elections throughout all the land shall be free, 
so that the fountain from which all the power of • Government 
should flow, shall not be choked and poisoned at its source ; we 
want that official extravagance should be stopped, that official 
economy should be enforced, and that the progress of real and 
substantial reform should be everywhere unchecked and trium- 
phant. "We want that the burden of taxation should be lighten- 
ed from the shoulders of the people, that confidence be restored, 
enterprise be revived, and the wheels of commerce again be set 
in motion. 



ORATION RICHARD o'oORMAN. 339 

We want that our Goverinent shall keep the nation's faith in- 
violate, fulfill all its just obligations, respecting and protecting 
all rights, all interests, not only of the public creditors, but of the 
debtor people. We want that the individual rights and dignity 
of our citizens be better respected by public servants ; we want 
no insolence in office, no assumption by any class or clique of 
the right to rule. We. want that all men, poor and rich, artisan 
and millionaire, shall be equal in the eye of the law, so that the 
Declaration of Independence shall not be a mere sounding phrase, 
but a wholesome fact. We want union, real, active, substantial, 
all through the republic, so that all men may think and work 
together for the common weal. 

These objects, I am sure, all the people desire to attain. It is 
for you to consider which of the two parties claiming your con- 
fidence is most able and most willing to carry out these objects. 
But think of these things for yourselves. Remember it is your 
own fate and the fate of all you hold most dear which is at 
stake. 

Let all the people rise to the level of their great duty. Let 
the sovereign ascend the throne and take the sceptre in his 
hand. That sovereign never dies. Forms of government 
change ; dynasties perish ; empires fall ; riches take wings and 
flee ; war devastates ; great cities decay ; the people alone re- 
main — conquest cannot kill it. Tyranny strives in vain to ex- 
haust its power of endurance. Sometimes it sleeps and men 
forget it ; sometimes it forgets itself ; but, like letters written in 
invisible ink, which only become legible when held to the fire, 
so in the flame of great emergency — in the stress and storm of 
great crisis, the spirit of the people start into life. 

Citizens of the great Republic, your hour is come. It is you 
now who are on trial. Only through your fault or folly can the 
Republic fall. Be true to your great record. Be equal to your 
great past. Across the chasm of a hundred years, your pre- 
decessors — the fathers and founders of this nation — speak to 
you to-day : 

"We watched over the cradle of the Republic," say they. 
" We protected its infancy from harm, and history, with pen of 
light, has written our names on her scroll of honor. Our work 



I-J40 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

lasted for one hundred years. Shall it be your wretched fate 
to watch the Republic in its decline and to follow it to its 
grave ? 

Have we no answer to give? Have the thousand voices of 
this great city no meaning ? Is there no response in all this 
magnificent festival, which reigns over all our land to-day ? Ay, 
there is. The chimes from the high steeples ring the answer 
out ; antham and hymn appeal to Heaven to witness its truth. 
This Republic shall live and not die. For a hundred years 
to come, it shall be prosperous, honored, free. This is our 
declaration. This promise we make to the past and to the 
future, and as our predecessors a hundred years ago, so say we. 
In support of this declaration, with a firm reliance on Divine 
Providence, we pledge our lives, our fortunes and our sacred 
honor. 



AMERICAN CITIZENSHIP. 

AN ORATION BY JUDGE H. A. GILDERSLEVE, 

AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION AT IRVING HALL, NEW YORK. CITY, 
JULY 4th, 1876. 

Fellow-Citizens : — We are gathered here to-day from "every 
quarter of this great metropolis, imbued with a common pur- 
pose and actuated by a common motive, which every individual 
present understands full well. Our ears are straining to hear 
and our minds are eager to receive the words of gratitude, 
patriotism and liberty — the themes to-day of 40,000,000 of free- 
men. Our hearts are swelling to greet these sentiments, and 
with shouts of applause to waft them on until they echo amid 
the white hills of the East and the mountains of the far West, 
or die away on the placid gulf of the South. 

One hundred years of liberty and union ! Not every year of 
peace and quiet, but if maintained sometimes by battle and 
blood so much the richer and dearer. Shall we not be 
pardoned on this day for manifestations of pride at the success 
of the Republic ? The history of the world shows the people of 
every nation possess, instinctively, pride and love of country, 
and are we not justly proud of our country, which can point to 
more progress and more great achievement in a single century 
than have been vouchsafed to any other nation in a decade of 
centuries ? 

The love of country ! Time cannot efface it, 
Nor distance dim its heaven descended light ; 

Nor adverse fame nor fortune e'er deface it. 
It dreads no tempest and it knows no night. 

Who would not be an American citizen and claim a home in 
these United States ? It has a home, bread and raiment for 
the family of every honest industrious man, no matter under 
what skies his eyes first saw the light of day, nor by what lan- 
guage he could be heard. Our lands are broad and free to all. 
The latch-string that opens to Uncle Sam's domain hangs ever 



342 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

on the outside, and honest emigrants are always welcome within 
our borders. We try to-day to show our gratitude to the noble 
men who secured our independence and laid the foundation of 
our prosperity. What a pleasant task ; but oh, how difficult ! 
We have no memory rich with thankfulness that is not theirs. 
We have no praise rich with reverence that is not theirs. The 
world never saw more unselfish or truer patriots. No legislative 
hall ever held wiser statesmen. Our liberty is the fruit of their 
labor and sacrifice. At the mention of the name of the humblest 
of their numbers we now bow in humble adoration and thanks- 
giving. May this warm affection never cool in the hearts of the 
American people ; may we never tire in studying the early his- 
tory of our Republic and the characters and lives of the great 
men who forged for us so strong and well the pillars of liberty 
and equality. They are the boasted strength of our government 
and the envy of the other nations of the world. The past is a 
sure and safe guard by which to build hereafter. Our history 
assures us of the bright and lasting future if we but cling to 
the sheet anchor of our safety, the Constitution of the United 
States, and in harmonious accord remain loyal to our country's 
flag — emblem of liberty, "flag of the free heart's hope and 
home." And when thrones shall have crumbled into dust, when 
scepters and diadems shall have long been forgotten, the flag of 
our Republic shall still wave on, and its stars, its stripes, its 
eagle shall still float in pride and strength and glory over the 
whole land ; not a stripe erased or polluted, or a single star 
obscured. 



THE HAND OF GOD IN AMEEIOAN HISTORY. 

A DISCOURSE BY REV. MORGAN DIX, D. I)., 

DELIVERED AT TRINITY CHURCH, NEW YORK, JULY 4tH, 187t>. 

Glory be to God ! and here, throughout the land, far and 
near, through all our homes, be peace, good will and love. As 
one family, as one people, as one nation, we keep the birthday 
of our rights, our liberty, our power and strength. Let us do 
this with eyes and hearts raised to the Fountain of all life, the 
Beginning of all glory and might ; with words of praise and 
thanks to God who rules on high ; fur He is the living God and 
steadfast power, and His kingdom that which shall not be des- 
troyed, and His dominion shall be even unto the end. Where- 
fore as He is our strength and hope, let all begin and all go on, 
first and ever, with glory to God Most High. There are great 
things to think about to-day ; the growth of the people, unpara- 
lelled in history ; the vastness of their empire, a wonder of the 
latter days ; the bands by which the mighty frame is held to- 
gether — so slight to the eye, so hard to break ; the many races 
welded into one ; the marvellous land, with its oceans on all 
sides, its lakes themselves like lesser oceans, its icebergs and gla- 
ciers, its torrid deserts, its mountain ranges and rich, fat valley 
land, its climates of all kinds, its rivers, which would have seem- 
ed of all but fabulous length, its wealth in all that rock, and 
earth, and water can supply ; and then the people — active, able, 
full of enterprise and force, acting with the power of a myriad of 
giants, speaking one language, living under one flag, bound by 
common interests, and, as to-day, kindled by one common feel- 
ing of devotion, pride, joy, hope, sure there is enough to think 
about to-day, enough to fill the soul and almost make the head 
giddy. But let these things be spoken of elsewhere ; let others 
dwell upon them. We have a definite share in the national cel- 
ebration : let us not forget our part, which is to lift to God a 



344 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

great voice which He shall hear amid all the other voices of the 
hour. Why do we gather here? Is it to recount the praises of 
men and their, mighty achievements ? Is it to make display of 
our national greatness, to tell over our victories and conqu< ssts 
in divers scenes of conflict, to celebrate the names and acts of 
chieftains, statesmen, and rulers of the land, of brave and pa- 
tient people who gave fortune, life, and sacred honor to the State, 
of any of those who deserve remembrance to-day ? Let this be 
done elsewhere, as is right and fitting ; let men stand up when 
it is convenient, and set oration and address do honor to the 
dead and the living, point the moral of our history, hold up the 
ideals' of patriotism, virtue, and unselfish love of home and native 
land. 

But we must be about our Father's business ; we have other 
words to speak, deeper, further -reaching ; our work here is to 
offer praise and glory to God ; to bless Him in His relations to 
the nation as its Lord and King, as Kuler and Governor, as 
Providence, law-giver, and Judge. "Without God nothing of 
what we properly value to-day could have been. Without God 
there could have been no nation, nor nation's birthday. It is 
He that hath made us and kept us one. The office of the Church 
is to bless and sanctify the nation's feast day. She cannot be 
indifferent nor unmoved. We are citizens of the earthly house 
as well as of the heavenly. We act in that double capacity in 
praising God Almighty, while with our brethren we keep the 
feast. And oh ! what ground for thankfulness to-day. Think 
of the mighty hand that hath led us and upheld us through 
these hundred years — what it has done for us — what that right 
hand of the Most High hath wrought ! Look back to the hum- 
ble beginnings — to the poor little Colonists with their scant 
store, and their modest ambitions ; think of their long-suffering 
patience, and also of their honorable resolve not to submit to 
oppression and injustice ; remember the band of men who met 
together, just one hundred years ago, to sign the Declaration, how 
they did it — not, as popular legends tell us, with transports of 
enthusiasm and amid bell-ringing and general jubilation, but in 
secret session of Congress. With an awful sense of what it 
meant. With a vision of the gibbet and the axe before their 



A DISCOURSE — KEV. MORGAN DIX. 345 

eyes, and well aware of the toil, and blood, and grief that it must 
cost to maintain their manly attitude before the world. Think 
with what dread and sinking of heart, with what tears and part- 
ings, with what conflicts of spirit, and what doubts as to the 
duty of the hour, the foundations were laid ; and let us have a 
tender heart toward the old fathers of the State, the men who 
took their lives in their hands, and so brought the new nation 
to the birth, and then amid what untold trials aud sufferings 
they carried on their war ! Think of the great hearts ready to 
break, of the starved and ragged armies with that mighty spirit 
under their hunger-worn ribs, more frequently retreating than 
advancing, wasted by sickly summer heat, and often in winter 
standing barefoot in snow ; that squalid, sorrowful, anxious force 
working their sure way through cloud, and storm, and darkness 
to the victory, perfect and finished, at the end. It is touching 
to read the memorials of those days, and to think of all that has 
come since then ; how we are entered into their labors, and are 
at peace because they went through all that ; they sowed in 
tears and we reap in joy. So then let there be thanks to God 
for the past, out of which He has evoked the present grandeur 
of our State, and let us remember what we owe to those who 
went before, for a part of that debt is obvious ; to imitate the 
virtues and return to the simple mind, the pure intention, the 
unselfish d votion to the public weal which marked the founders 
of the Republic. It is a far cry to those days, but there still 
shine the stars which guided them on their way, the light of 
heaven illuminating the earth, the bright beacons of honesty, 
truth, simplicity, sincerity, self-sacrifice, under which, as under 
an astrological sign, the little one was born. Pray heaven those 
holy lights of morality and public virtue may not, for us, already 
have utterly faded away. Surely it is a marvellous thing to see 
how nations rise and grow ; how they gather strength ; how 
they climb to the meridian of their noonday light and glory ; 
how they blaze awhile, invested with their fullest splendors at 
that point, and thence how they decline and rush downward 
into the evening, and the night, and the darkness of a long, dead 
sleep, whence none can awake any more. This history is not 
made without God. His hand is in it all. His decrees on 



316 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

nation and State are just, in perfect justice, as on each one of 
us men. And must it all be told over again in our case ? Is 
there no averting the common doom? Must each people but 
repeat the monotonous history of those who went before? God 
only knows how long the course will be till all shall be ac- 
complished. But certainly we, the citizens, may do something ; 
we may live pure, honest, sober lives, for the love of country 
also, as well as for the love of Christ. We may, by taking good 
heed to ourselves, help to purify the whole nation, and so obtain 
a lengthening of our tranquility. We want much more of this 
temper ; wc need to feel that each man helps, in his own way, 
to save or to destroy his country. Every good man is a reason \ 
in God's eyes why He should spare the nation and prolong its ] 
life ; every bad man, in his vicious, selfish, evil life, is a reason 
why God should break up the whole system to which that 
worthless, miserable being belongs. 

If we love our country with a true, real love we shall show it 
by contributing in ourselves to the sum of collective righteous- 
ness what it may be in our power, aided by God's grace, to 
give. They are not true men who have no thanks to bring to 
the Lord this day. They are not true men who simply shout 
and cry, and make noisy demonstration, and speak great swell- 
ing words, without reason, or reflection, or any earnest thought 
to duty, to God, and the State. From neither class can any 
good come ; not from the senselessly uproarous, not from the 
livid and gloomy children of discontent. They were thought- 
ful, patriotic, self-sacrificing men who built this great temple 
of civil and religious liberty. By such men only can it be kept 
in repair and made to stand for ages and ages. No kingdom of 
this world can last forever, yet many endure to a great age 
The old mother country, England, in her present constitutional 
form, is more than 800 years old — a good age, a grand age, 
with, we trust and pray, many bright centuries to come here- 
after, as good, as fair. Let us remember that for us, as for all 
people, length of days and long life and peace depend on the 
use we make of our gifts, on the fidelity with which we dis- 
charge our mission. And that is the reason why every one of 
us has, in part, his country's life in his own hands, ,But I 



A DISCOURSE REV. MORGAN DIX. 347 

detain you from the duty of the hour. We meet to praise not 
man, but God ; to praise Him with a reasonable and devout 
purpose ; to bless him for our first century, for this day which 
He permits us to see, for our homes, our liberties, our peace 
our place among the powers of the earth. It is all from him, 
whatever good we have, and to him let us ascribe the honor and 
the glory. And let us say, with them of old time. 

"Blessed art Thou, O Lord God of our fathers ; ;ind to be 
praised and exalted above all forever. 

And Blessed is Thy glorious and holy name ; and to be praised 
and exalted above all forever. 

Blessed art Thou in the temple of Thine holy glory ; and to 
be praised and glorified above all forever. 

Blessed art Thou that beholdest the depths and sittest upon 
the cherubims; and to be praised and exalted above all for- 
ever. 

Blessed art Thou in the glorious throne of thy kingdom ; to 
be praised and glorified above all forever. 

Blessed art Thou in the firmament of heaven ; and above all 
to be praised and glorified forever. 

Yea, let us bless the Most High, and praise and honor Him 
that liveth forever, whose dominion is an everlasting dominion, 
and His kingdom is from generation to generation. And all 
the inhabitants of the earth are reputed as nothing ; and He 
cloeth according to His will in the army of heaven and among 
the inhabitants of the earth." 

The exercises closed with the benediction by Right Rev. 
Horatio Potter, D. D., Bishop of the Diocese. 



OUR TIAGc. 

BY REV. H. II. BIRKINS. 

DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION, WASHINGTON HEIGHTS, 
NEW YORK CITY, JULY 4, 1876. 

Mr. Chairman : — One of the most conspicuous and pleas- 
ing objects in our broad land to-day, is the starry emblem 
of freedom — our dear old flag. We see it, a centennial 
spectacle, floating everywhere, as we never saw it before, 
and as we never shall see it again. It is unfurled along 
our highways, it adorns our public and private dwellings, 
it floats over our temples of worship, our halls of learning and 
coiuts of justice, and waves as grandly and gracefully over the 
lowest cottage in the land, as over the proud dome of the 
capital itself. It is our flag, with sweet centennial memories 
clinging to every fold, our flag along whose stiipes we may trace 
the triumphant march of one hundred years, and from whose 
stars we see the light of hope and liberty still flashing upon the 
nations. 

The origin of our flag is, to some extent, involved in mystery 
and controversy. It has been claimed by some that its stars 
aud stripes were first taken from the shield of the Washington 
family, which was distinguished by colored lines and stars ; and 
if this be so, it is not at all improbable, though by no means 
certain, that Washington himself may have suggested the pe- 
culiar form of the flag. The first distinctively American flag 
was unfurled to the breeze on the first day of January, 1776. 
It consisted of " seven white and seven red stripes," and bore 
upon its front the " red and white crosses of St. George and St. 
Andrew," and was called " The Great Union Flag." This flag 
quickly displaced all other military devices, and became the bat- 
tle-banner of the American Army. In 1777, however, it was 
greatly changed. The crosses were omitted and thirteen red 
and white stripes were used to denote the thirteen States, and 



OtJE FLAG — H. H. BIRKlNS. 349 

thirteen stars were used to represent the union of those States. 
And our flag still retains its stars occasionally adding one to the 
number, and, as traitors know to their sorrow, it also still re- 
tains its stripes, well laid on. We have never found it necessary 
to ask true American citizens to respect and honor our flag. 
When Gen. Dix, on the 29th of January, 1861, penned those 
terse memorable words : " If any one attempts to haul down the 
American flag shoot him on the spot ; " the loyal people of the 
nation said, "Amen. So let it be." 

We do not wonder that our people, and especially our soldiers 
love the flag. It is to them both a history and a prophecy. 
No wonder that brave soldier as he fell on the field of battle said, 
" Boys, don't wait for me ; just open the folds of the old flag 
and let me see it once more before I die." 

No wonder that Massachusetts soldier boy, dying in the gory 
streets of • Baltimore, lifted up his glazing eyes to the flag and 
shouted, " All hail, the stars and the stripes ! ! ! " Our flag is a 
power everywhere. One has justly said, " It is known, respected 
and feared round the entire globe. Wherever it goes, it is the re- 
cognized symbol of intelligence, equality, freedom and Christian 
civilization. Wherever it goes the immense power of this great 
Republic goes with it, and the hand that touches the honor of 
the flag, touches the honor of the Republic itself. On Sj>anish 
soil, a man entitled to the protection of our government was 
arrested and condemned to die. The American consul inter- 
ceded for his life, but was told that the man must suffer death. 
The hour appointed for the execution came, and Spanish guns, 
gleaming in the sunlight, were ready for the work of death. At 
that critical moment the American consul took our flag, and 
folded its stars and stripes around the person of the doomed 
man, and then turning to the soldiers, said : " Men, reniember 
that a single shot through that flag will be avenged by the entire 
power of the American Republic." That shot was never fired. 
And that man, around whom the shadows of death were gather- 
ing, was saved by the stars and the stripes. ' Dear old flag ! 
Thou art a power at home and abroad. Our fathers loved thee 
in thine infancy, one hundred years ago ; our heroic dead loved 
thee, and we loved thee, at A fondly clasp thee to our hearts to- 



H/jO OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

day. All thy stars gleam like gems of beauty on thy brow, and 
all thy stripes beam upon the eye like bows of promise to the 
nation. 

Wave on, thou peerless, matchless banner of the free ! Wave 
on, over the army and the navy, over the land and the sea, over 
the cottage and the palace, over the school and the church, over 
the living and the dead ; wave ever more, " O'er the land of the 
free and the home of the brave." 



OUR NATIONAL INFLUENCE. 

AN ADDRESS BY REV. THOS. ARMITAGE, D.D. 

DELIVERED IN THE YOUNG MEN'S CHRISTIAN ASSOCIATION HALL, NEW 
YORK CITY, JULY 4TH, 1876. 

We stand to-day, nationally, very much like a school of boys 
passing up into a higher grade of education. Hitherto, we 
have been but in the primary department. The revolution of 
1176, was based not merely upon legislative measures, but the 
struggle was begun and completed, upon the great underlying 
principles of human nature itself. Anchored to these princi- 
ples success was certain and perfect. Freedom, and the love 
of freedom, have been the glory of our history as a nation. 
Just where we have been free we have been strong, and just 
where we have not been free, we have been week. Yet, in a 
century, through which inexperience has been feeling its way, 
our nation has wrought out, and put into practical operation, 
the freest constitution in the world, — or I would rather say, 
the only free popular constitution in history. This instrument 
is the production of growth, having attained its present per- 
fection by a series of progressive steps, or amendments, without 
taking one step backwards. Now, the solitary grandeur of this 
bond consists in the fact, that it does not cover one of those old 
crimes against the citizen which has always been perpetrated 
against him under the highest civilization in Europe. We 
boast to-day, that the foot of a slave does not press Ameri- 
can soil. But is this all ? Ought not every just mind, to re- 
member with gratitude, that America has never originated any 
system of bondage. That dark system of slavery, which cost 
us so dearly, was bequeathed to us by the Dutch, the French, 
the Spainish and the English. The old American Colonies 
were almost unanimously arrayed against it, from Massachusetts 
to Georgia. (Jeorgia, declared that it was " against the gospel 
and the English law," and was a " horrid crime." Virginia, 



352 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE 

earnestly petitioned the Crown to allow her total exemption 
from it, alleging, that it would " endanger her very existence ;" 
and South Carolina resisted the imposition of slavery upon her 
as an outrage. 

But British cupidity insisted that the system, including the 
slave trade, was necessary in the colonies, to the building up of 
British commerce : therefore, the mother country turned a 
deaf ear to the wishes of the colonies, and forced slavery upon 
them against their consciences — against their rights — and 
againsi their remonstrances. More than that, she actually made 
a treaty with Spain, by which she was to enjoy the monopoly of 
the slave trade, and pledged herself to import 144,000 slaves 
into the "West Indies within thirty years ; and Queen Anne and 
Philip, took half the stock between them. Hence, when the 
Republic came into being, slavery was found in every colony. 
As well as they could, the fathers of our country began to re- 
move it at once. The world had been balancing the question 
of freedom and bondage for thousands of years. Asia had in- 
vestigated it, as best she could under the light of her civililiza- 
tion. Africa had attempted to solve the difficulty — and Europe 
had legislated upon it in every form. But it was left for the 
American colonies to say to the world, for the first time, on the 
4th of July, 1716, that "All men are bom, free and equal." 

This avowal astonished the world, as if it were a formidable 
heresy; but when American democracy sealed it in patriotic 
blood, the world was thunderstruck, for no nation had ever 
thought of stamping the seal of its blood on that doctrine be- 
fore. And, from that day to this, in one hundred years, the 
American Republic has done more for liberty and against 
bondage than all other people had done before. Britain is en- 
titled to great credit for her West Indian emancipation. But 
it cost her half a century of bitter agitation before she could 
adopt that high policy, as well as great treasure. Even then, 
she adopted it merely as a policy and paid for it as a bargain, 
failing largely to bring down the doctrine of freedom to the 
question of man's rights as the root of his humanity. 

Peter Bayne, one of her ablest sons, says on this point: 
"With a look of magnanimity, justice, and love, Biitain un- 



ADDRESS — REV. THOS. ARMITAGE. 353 

chained her slaves ; with a superb generosity, she paid down 
twenty millions, and washed from her hands the stain of blood. 
The nations of the earth looked on in admiration ; from the 
four corners of the world came shouts of applause. It seemed 
indubitable that it had been an act of justice and humanity to 
the negro. But the plaudits were premature. If appearances 
could be trusted, it was not the negro but herself Britain had 
spared." She did not move a step in her West India policy, till 
she was well persuaded that it was for her fiscal interests to do 
so, and then, the measures which she adopted to free herself 
of slavery, were those which half a dozen of the American States 
had already adopted ; always excepting, that they freed their 
slaves without remuneration, while she claimed and paid to her- 
self their full monied value. Meanwhile, without being the 
author of the slave system, our nation has quietly gone forward* 
working out the problem of the Declaration of Independence, 
and in a century, on the principle that slavery jeoparded the 
liberties of the nation, has made this the home of free men only, 
and forever. 

Then, again, we ought to give thanks, no less, because, the 
influence of our nation has been extremely wholesome upon othe 
nations; chiefly, through the influence of this Republic the 
late French empire failed to bring Mexico back to monarchical 
institutions, under Maxamilian. And, certainly, no weU informed 
man can doubt that the moral weight of example on the part of 
the United States has been very great upon the modern political 
history of France herself. The present constitutional Republic 
of France, built up over the grave of Napoleon III., and con- 
formed so largely to the model of our own, sufficiently attests 
this. Then again, the power of the American States has been 
immensely felt upon the destinies of Spain. Unfit from want of 
proper educational culture, for the liberties of a firm republic, 
she has made the attempt to found one, with anamount of success 
that has astonished those who are best acquainted with her intel- 
lectual and moral status. The form thereof has passed away for the 
present, but the seeds of civil and religious liberty have been sown 
in her constitution and institutions, so freely and efficiently, that 
they can never be uprooted hereafter. And most of all, the 



354 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

reflex influence of this country upon Great Britain herself, has 
been, and is still felt. In many respects the influence acting 
back and forth between the two nations, the one upon the other, 
has been reciprocal, as would be natural, arising from a com- 
mon origin of language, blood, common law and religion, to say 
nothing of the mutual interests of commerce. But in all politi- 
cal aspects, our political life has had a leavening influence upon 
tbem tenfold greater than theirs has been upon us. Within 
my own memory Roman Catholics could not sit in the English 
Parliament, and a jew could not be a British citizen. Now, all 
this is done away with, and as in our own country, no religious 
test is applied in her parliamentary representation so that the 
Catholic commoner and peer sit side by side with their Protest- 
ant fellow-citizens, and a native Jew is Premier of the empire. 

With the overthrow of religious caste in her parliament, Eng- 
land has abandoned her Stamp Act upon newspapers, leaving 
the press free in more senses than one — has extended her suf- 
frage, till it is all but universal — has granted the right of the 
ballot — abolished religious tests in her universities — disestab- 
lished the Irish Church— and made merit and not purchase the 
price of promotion in her army. All these are American meas- 
ures, and for all these, and many other things, we should give 
thanks to God ; these blessings are from Him. 

And as to the future, let us resolve to conserve all our liber- 
ties more jealously than ever. It is with pain that we think of 
any bigot amongst us breathing the thought that the proscrip- 
tion of Roman Catholics in the United States is within the pos- 
sibility of toleration. I feel ashamed when I hear men say 
that the Catholic and his religion have no right here, for the 
claim is a most prepostrous one. Did not Roman Catholics 
discover America ? Have they not mingled their blood with 
other patriots, first in securing the independence of the United 
States from Britain, and then in perpetuating its liberties in 
the late civil war? Who were Carroll and Rosecrans and 
Sheridan, but Catholics ? besides thousands of other patriots, 
whose names will be dear to the country while it stands. And 
it is not a little mortifying that the two great political conven- 
tions recently held have not yet learned that proscription of 



ADDKESS THOS. AKM1TAGE. 355 

the Mongolian is just as odious to true American principles on 
the subject of human rights, as the bondage of negroes, and 
the persecution of Jews or Catholics. If " all men are born free 
and equal," and this utterance means anything but an empty- 
avowal, then, Mongolians have as much right here as Africans, 
or Europeans, or anybody else, and are entitled to the same 
liberties. 

I apprehend that the men of a hundred years to come will 
blush to think that black men or white — Jew or heathen — 
skeptic or Christian — can be questioned as to their right to a 
home in this land, and to protection under its banner, as com- 
ing of their rightful inheritance in common with others, to all 
the immunities of men, and that simply on the ground that 
they are " men.' 1 



CENTENNIAL ODE. 

BY WILLIAM CULLEN - BRYAXT. 

SUNG AT NEW YOEK, JULY 4, 1876, 

Through storm and calm the years have lead 
Our nation on from stage to stage 

A century's space until we tread 
The threshold of another age. 

We see there, o'er our pathway swept, 
A torrent stream of blood and fire ; 

And thank the ruling power who kept 
Our sacred league of States entire. 

Oh ! checkered train of years, farewell, 

With all thy strifes and hopes and fears ; 

But with us let thy memories dwell, 

To warn and lead the coming years. 

And thou, the new beginning age, 

Warned by the past and not in vain, 

Write on a fairer, whiter page 

The record of thy happier reign. 



THE ADVANCE OF A CENTUEY, 

AN ORATION BY REV. HENRY WARD BEEOHER. 

DELIVERED AT PEEKSKILL, N. Y., JULY 4TH, 1876. 

Of all the places on this Continent, where, from political con- 
siderations, vast assemblies should gather to-day, there is no 
place that can equal Philadelphia, where that orator and states- 
man and civilian, Evarts, is holding in rapt attention the great 
crowds. Yet if it be not a question of political but of military 
interest, I know of no other point throughout the land where 
the people may more fitly assemble for retrospect and for pride 
than in this goodly place of Peekskill. For we stand in the 
very centre of the military operations that were during the 
Revolution conducted in the northern part of the country. 
The great ferry— the King's Ferry, by which chief communica- 
tion was had between all New England and New Jersey and 
Pennsylvania, within whose bounds there was the greatest part 
of the population of the county — lies right opposite to us. 
This is the centre of the scene of that vast drama. Around 
this region was that great drama played — the treachery of 
Arnold and the sad recompense upon Andre. In these streets 
our armies have trod. In this town, indeed, Washington dated 
the commission which was the last received by Arnold at the 
hands of his countrymen. Off upon this bay hovered the 
British fleet. 

A hundred years have passed since this region was the 
theatre of such stirring scenes and vicissitudes. A hundred 
years is a long period in the life of a man — a short period in 
the life of a nation. A hundred years ! It is eighteen hun- 
dred since the Advent. A thousand years scarcely take us 
back beyond the beginning of European nations in their mod- 
ern form. A hundred years is scarcely the " teens " to which 
nations come. And it seldom happens that any nation has for 
its thousand such a hundred years as that which has been 



358 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

vouchsafed to us. From a population of scant three millions, 
including the slave pojralation, we have swelled to more than 
forty millions. Then a small strip of settled territory lined the 
Atlantic. Almost no foot except the pioneer's had trod the 
mountain path, or had pressed the soil of the country beyond. 
Now the Atlantic and the Pacific are joined by the wire and by 
the iron road, and that has come to pass in reality which in the 
Scripture is spoken of in poetry — " Deep answers unto deep ;" 
and the ocean breaks upon one shore to be answered by the 
other ; and all the way across the thickly-settled communities — 
towns and cities innumerable. 

And yet this is but small as compared with the augmentation 
of material interests. The wealth that scarcely now is com- 
putable, the industries that thrive, the inventions, the discov- 
eries, the organizations of labor and of capital, the vast spread 
of the industries through the valleys and over the hills — who 
can estimate that of the early day which was but as a seed com- 
pared with that of our day which waves like Lebanon ? And 
yet what are machines, ships and rails — what are granaries and 
roads and canals — what are herds upon a thousand hills — • 
what are all these in comparison with man ? All labor and the 
products of labor are valuable only as they promote the virtue 
and the comfort of man — only as they promote the manhood 
which is in man. Though we had a quadrupled wealth, yet if 
the people were decayed or enfeebled, what would our pros- 
perity be worth ? Not worth the assembling here to look back 
upon, or to look forward to. The value of our material growth 
is to be estimated by its effect upon the people. 

What, then, has been the history of a hundred years in re- 
gard to the people of America ? Are they as virtuous as they 
were a hundred years ago ? Are they as manly as they were a 
hundred years ago ? Are they as intelligent, are they as re- 
ligious as they were a hundred years ago ? Not only that — 
have these individuals that we shall find, perhaps, as we ex- 
amine, to be more or less religious, moral, intelligent, happy — 
have they learned anything in that highest of all arts, the art of 
man to live with man — the art of organizing society, of con- 
ducting government, of promoting the common weal through 



ORATION REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 359 

broad spaces and through vast multitudes ? What is the his- 
tory of the people ? What are we to-day ? What our fathers 
were we know. Their life was spent ; their history was regis- 
tered ; we read what they were, and form an estimate of them 
with gratitude to God ; but what are we, their sons ; Have 
we shrunk ? Are we unworthy of their names and places and 
functions, which have been transmitted from their hands to 
ours ? What are the laws, what are the institutions, what is 
the Government, what are the policies of this great nation, re- 
deemed from foreign thrall to home independence ? Are they 
committed to puny hands, or is manhood broadened and 
strengthened and ennobled ? 

Look then at our population. See what it is, spread abroad 
through all the land. It might almost be said that America 
represents every nation on the globe better than the nation re- 
presents itself. We have the best things they have got in 
Ireland, for we have stripped her almost bare. We have the 
canny Scotchman in great numbers among us, though not 
enough for our own good, and too many for Scotland's good. 
We have the Englishman among us, and are suspected our- 
selves of having English blood in our veins ! We have also 
those from Norway, Sweden, Denmark, Russia even, Germany, 
Austria and Hungary, Italy, Spain, France, Switzerland. We 
can cull from all these nations out of our population men in 
large numbers of whom they are not ashamed, and for whom 
we are grateful. We have our fields tilled by foreign hands, 
and our roads built by them. 

This is a matter of political economy ; but the question which 
I propose to you is, What are they as component elements of a 
new American stock ? Do you believe in stock — do you believe 
in blood? I do. Do you believe in "crossing" judiciously ? 
Do you believe that the best blood of all nations will ultimate 
by and by in a better race than the primitive and the incomplex 
races ? Mixed now in kindly alliance we have fortified and en- 
riched our blood ; we have called the world to be our father 
and the father of our posterity ; and there never was a time in 
the history of this nation when the race stock had in it so much 
that was worth the study of the physiologist and philauthro- 



360 OUB. NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

pist as to-day. We are enriched beyond the power of grat- 
itude. I for one regard all the inconveniences of foreign 
mixtures, the difference of language, the difference of customs, 
the difference of religion, the difference in domestic arrange- 
ments — I regard all these inconveniences as a trifle ; but the 
augmentation of power, of breadth, of manhood, the promise 
of the future, is past all computation ; and there never was, 
there never began to be iu the early day, such promise of 
physical vigor and of beauty and energy and life as there is to- 
day upon this continent. 

And now consider not only that this race-stock for these 
reasons is made a better one than that which existed a hundred 
years ago, but that the conditions of existence among the whole 
population are becter than they were a hundred years ago. We 
not only wear better heads, but we have better bellies, with 
better food in them. We have also better clothes now. In 
other words, the art of liviug healthily has advanced immensely ; 
and though cities have enlarged, and though the causes of 
danger to sanitary conditions are multiplied, science has kept 
pace ; and there never was a time, I will not say in our own 
history, but in the history of any nation on the globe, when the 
conditions of life \vere so wholesome, the conditions of hap- 
piness so universally diffused, as they are to-day in this great 
land. We grumble — we inherit that from our ancestors ; we 
often mope and vex ourselves with melancholy prognostications 
concerning this and that danger. Some men are born to see 
the devil of melancholy ; they would see him sitting in the very 
door of heaven, methinks ! Not I ; for though there be mis- 
chiefs and troubles, yet when we look at the great conditions of 
human life in society, they have been augmented favorably, and 
they never were so favorable as they are to-day. 

More than that : if you look at the diversity of the industries 
by which men ply their hands, if you look at the accumulating 
power of the average citizen, you will find that it is in the power 
of a man to earn more in a single ten years of his life to-day 
than for our ancestors in the whole breadth of their life. The 
heavens are nearer to us than they were to them : for we have 
learned the secrets of the storm and of the subtle lisrhtninsr. 



ORATION REV. HENRY "WARD BEECHER. 361 

The earth itself is but just outside our door-yard. We can now 
call to xVsia and the distant part of the earth easier than they 
could to Boston or Philadelphia a hundred years ago : and all 
the fleets of the world bring hither the tiibute of the globe, and 
that not for the rich man and the sumptous liver, but for the 
common folks of the land to which we all belong. The houses 
in which we live are better ; better warmed in winter — and our 
summers are well warmed too. The implements by which the 
common man works are multiplied ; the processes which he can 
control, and which are so organized in society that he gets the 
reflex benefit of them, are incalculable. And all that the soil 
has, all that the sea has, all that the mountain locks up, and all 
that is invisible in the atmosphere, are so many servitors work- 
ing in this great democratic land for the multitude, for the great 
mass of the common people. We are in that regard advanced 
far beyond the days of our fathers ; for then they had not es- 
caped from the hereditary influences of aristocratic thoughts, 
aristocratic classes, or aristocratic tendencies even in govern- 
ment. But the progress of democracy — which is not merely 
political, but which is in religion, in literature, in art, and even 
in mechanics — the great wave of democratic influence has been 
for a hundred years washing in further and further toward the 
feet of the common people. And to-day there is not on the face 
of the globe another forty millions that have such amplitude of 
sphere, such strength of purpose, such instruments to their 
hand, such capital, such opportunity, such happiness. And that 
leads me to speak — going aside from the common people indi- 
vidually or as in classes — of their institutions, and let me begin 
where you began, in the household. 

What is the family and the household to-day as compared 
with the family and the household a hundred years ago ? Time 
is a great magnifying medium. "We look back a hundred years 
and think that things in the household and society must have 
been better and finer than they are to-day. No, no. If there 
has been one thing that has grown silently, without measure- 
ment, without estimation and without appreciation, it has been 
the scope, the richness, the happiness, the purity, the intelli- 
gence, of the American household. For, although there were 



3(52 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

here and there notable mansions; here and there not able house- 
holds of truth, intelligence and virtue in the olden time yet we 
are concerned with the averages ; and the average American 
household is wiser to-day than it was a hundred years ago. 

There is more material for thought, for comfort and for home 
loving to-day, in the ordinary workman's house, than there was 
a hundred years ago in one of a hundred rich men's mansions. 
For no man among us is so poor — unless he drinks whiskey too 
much ; no man that was well born among us (and to be well 
born is, first, to be born at all, and secondly, to be born out of 
virtuons parents, who set the child good examples) — no man 
that has been well born in this land is so poor as to stand at 
the bottom of the ladder for twenty years. No man in this 
country needs to do that, unless there has been some radical de- 
fect in his birth or his training. The laborer ought to be 
ashamed of himself who in twenty years does not own the 
ground his house stands on, and the house unmortgaged ; who 
has not in that house provided carpets for the rooms, who has 
china in his cupboards, who has not his chromos, who has not 
some piciure or portrait hanging upon the walls, who has not 
some books nestling on the shelf, who has not a household that 
calls home the sweetest place on earth. This is not at all a 
picture of the future ; it is a picture of the homes of the work- 
ingmen of America. The average workingmen live better to- 
day in the household and in the family than they did a hundred 
years ago. We have come to it stealthily, without record or ob- 
servation ; yet it is none the less true that the average condi- 
tion of the household for domestic comfort has gone up more 
than one per cent, for every year of the last hundred years. 

But that is not all. The members of the household also have 
developed, and chiefly she into whose hand God put the rudder 
of time. For if Eve plucked the apple that Adam might help 
her eat it, she has been beforehand with him and has steered 
him ever since. The household that has a bad woman may 
have an angel for a husband, but he is helpless. The household 
that has a brute for a husband is safe if the woman be God's 
own woman. It has long been a proverb that a man is what 
his wife will let him be. It is more than a proverb that the 



ORATION REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 3G3 

children are what the mother makes them. She is the legislator 
of the household ; she is the judge that sits upon the throne of 
love. All severity comes from love in a mother's hand ; she is 
the educator ; she also is the atonement when sins and trans- 
gressions have brought children to shame. The altar of peni- 
tence is at the mother's knee, and not the heart of God knows 
better how to forgive than she. Now if womanhood has gone 
down, woe be to us; for the richer we are and the stronger we 
are the worse we are; but if womanhood has gone up in intelli- 
gence, in influence, in virtue and religion, then the country is 
safe, though its fleets were sunk and its cities were burned, 
though its crops were mildewen and blasted. For easy is re- 
covery where the head forces are sound ; but where there is 
corruption at the initial point of power all outward adjuvants 
and helps are in vain. 

And I declare that in the last hundred years woman, who 
before had brooded and blossomed in aristocratic circles, has 
in America come to blossom through democratic circles, and is 
in America to-day undisputed and uncontradicted what before 
she has been allowed to be only when she had a coronet upon 
her brow, or some scepter of power in her hand. Not only is 
she unvailed, not only is she permitted to show her face where 
men do congregate, not only is she a power in the silence of the 
house, but she has become in the church a teacher ; and Paul 
from a thousand years ago may in vain now say, " Let not your 
women teach in the church." They cannot go there without 
being teachers and silent letters. They are the books and epis- 
tles that are known and read of all men. They have come to 
such a degree of knowledge, they have come to such a use of 
intellectual treasure, they have so learned how to dispose of 
that primal and highest gift, moral intuition, which God gave 
to them in excess over man, as that never before in any land, 
certainly never in our own, was womanhood at such a point of 
power and influence as the present day. Nor has she done 
growings That power which was latent and indirectly applied 
is seeking for itself channels that shall be direct and influential. 
You may die too soon*to see, as many have died before they saw 
the beatific vision, but you that live long enough will see woman 



3G4 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

vote, and when you see woman voting you will see less lying, 
less selfishness, less brutality, and more public spirit and hero- 
ism and romance in public affairs. I do not propose to discuss 
the question at any length with you, but I cannot fail to recog- 
nize, with thanksgiving, that steady advance which is sure to 
make woman a voter in this generation. 

In the beginning of our history no man could vote who was 
not a member of the church; and, by the way, the deacons, to 
relieve the church members from the trouble of calling at the 
ballot-boxes, took their hats and went around and coUected the 
votes from house to house; but deacons in those days were 
trustworthy. After a little a man was allowed to vote, though he 
did not belong to the church, if he was a white man and owned 
property to a certain amount, and that was the first step in 
augmentation of suffrage and the widening of its distribution. 

After a time it became necessary to knock down even that ex- 
ception. Franklin labored with might and main to this end, 
and employed that significant argument : "If a man may not 
vote unless he is a property-holder to the amount of one hun- 
dred dollars, and he owns an ass that is worth just a hundred 
dollars, and to-day the ass is well and he votes, but to-morrow 
the ass dies, and he cannot vote — which votes, the ass or the 
man ?" The property qualification disappeared before the demo- 
cratic wave, which washed it all away. 

Then came the question of foreigners' voting. They were 
not allowed to vote except upon long probation. Like many of 
your fences, one rail after another fell down, until the fence that 
at first was so high that it could not be jumped, became so low 
that anything could jump it that wanted to ; and in New York 
now they jump it quite easily. But the day is coming, and I 
hope very soon, when this pretense of limitation will itself be 
taken away, and every man that means in good faith to settle 
here shall have it proclaimed to him, the moment he stands 
here, " You are not to partake of the protection of our laws 
without bearing your own personal responsibility for the exe- 
cution of those laws." I would make every man vote the mo- 
ment he touches the soil of this country.* 

The next step to this was the admission of the colored man 



ORATOtN — REV. HENRY WARD SEECHER. 3G5 

to the franchise. This was the boldest thing that ever was 
done. It is said that it was a war measure. It was necessarily 
so connected with the war as to come under that general desig- 
nation ; and I aver that no land ever, even in war, did so brave 
and bold a thing as to take from the plantation a million black 
men who could not read the Constitution or the spelling-book, 
and who could hardly tell one hand from the other, and permit 
them to vote, in the sublime faith that liberty, which makes a 
man competent to vote, would render him fit to discharge the 
duties of the voter. And I beg to say, as I am bound to say, 
that when this one million unwashed black men came to vote, 
though much disturbance occurred — as much disturbance al- 
ways occurs upon great changes — they proved themselves 
worthy of the trust that had been confided to them. Before 
emancipation the black man was the most docile laborer that 
the world ever saw. During the war, when he knew that his 
liberty was the gage, when he knew the battle was to decide 
whether he should or should not be free, although the country 
for hundreds of miles was stripped bare of able-bodied white 
men, and though property and the lives of the women and chil- 
dren were at the mercy of the slave, there never was an instance 
of arson, or assassination, or rapine, or conspiracy, and there 
never was an uprising. They stood still, conscious of their 
power, and said, " We will see what God will do for us." Such 
a history has no parallel. 'And since they began to vote, I beg 
leave to say, in closing this subject, that they have voted just as 
wisely and patriotically as their late masters did before the 
emancipation. 

And now there is but one step more. We permit the lame, 
the halt, and the blind to go to the ballot-box ; we permit the 
foreigner and the black man, the slave and the freeman, to par- 
take of suffrage ; there is but one thing left out ; and that is 
the mother that taught us, and the wife that is thought worthy 
to walk side by side with us. It is woman that is put lower 
than the slave — lower than the ignorant foreigner. She is put 
among the paupers and the insane whom the law will not allow 
to vote. But the days are numbered in which the exclusion 
can take place. 



366 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

So in a hundred years suffrage has extended its bounds until 
it includes the whole population, and there is nothing left that 
will not vote in less than another hundred years, unless it be 
the power-loom, the locomotive, and the watch ; and I some- 
times think, looking at these machines and their performances, 
and seeing what they do, that they too ought to vote. 

More than that, during this time what has been the progress 
of the country in intelligence and the means of intelligence ? 
A hundred years ago, I had almost said, school-houses could 
be counted, certainly upon the hairs of your head, if not upon 
the fingers of your hand, in New England and throughout the 
country. As I remember them, they were miserable, unpainted 
buildings, that roasted you in winter and stank in summer, with 
slabs for seats, with old Webster for the spelling-book, with 
Daboll for the arithmetic, with three months of school in the 
winter, and with one, two or three in summer. Compare them 
with the high schools, the graded schools, and the primary 
schools, that are now the pride of every populous neighbor- 
hood. Has there been no augmentation in the instruments of 
intelligence. 

Then there were perhaps twenty newspapers in the United 
States. Alas ! how they have increased since then ! These are 
said to be the leaves of the tree for the healing of the nations ; 
and often in this regard that comes to pass which comes to pass 
in sickness — that men who take the leaves are made sicker than 
they were before. But every man reads the newspaper to-day. 
The drayman, at his nooning, divides the time between his little 
tin kettle and his newspaper. A man, though he goes home tired, 
yet must know what is the news. The vast majority of labor- 
ing men — not to speak of professional men, and men whose 
business requires that they shall read — know before the setting 
of the sun, on any given day, what is being done in Asia, what 
is being done in Turkey, what is being done in California, what 
is being done the world round — for this is a pocket-world 
now, when every man can carry it round for himself, in his 
newspaper. 

Consider how cheap books are. Consider how wide is the dif- 
fusion of knowledge through essays, through treatises of va- 



ORATION — REV. HENRY WAUD BEECHER. 367 

rious lands, through lectures, through all manner of instru- 
ments of enlightenment. Consider how our political organiza- 
tions are turning themselves into great educating conventions, 
in which the best men discourses on their theories of govern- 
ment. 

I hold that no German university ever had it in its halls such 
legists or judical men as were turned out by wholesale in this 
country during the late war, and for years preceding that war, 
for the discussion of questions relating to the rights of the indi- 
vidual, the nature of the State, the duty of the citizen, and the 
functions and prerogatives of the Legislature and the Govern- 
ment. Never were a people so educated as this people were dur- 
ing the twenty-five years which jxreceded the present. For, let 
me tell you, in 1776 there were twenty-nine public libraries in 
the United States ; or, there were about one and two-thirds vol- 
umes for each hundred of the people in the country. In 1876 
there are 3,682 public libraries in the United States, not includ- 
ing the libraries of the common schools, of the Church, or the 
Sunday schools, numbering in the aggregate 12,276,000 volumes, 
or about thirty volumes to one hundred persons. Between 1775 
and 1800 — a period of twenty-five years — there were twenty 
public libraries formed. During another period of twenty-five 
years — between 1800 and 18 25 — there were 179 public libraries 
formed. During the next period of twenty-five years — between 
1825 aud 1850 — there were 551 public libraries formed. Dur- 
ing the twenty -five years intervening between 1850 and 1875, 
there were 2,240 public libraries formed. And in all the history 
of America there has not been a period when the brain of the 
rjopulation has teemed with such fertility as it did during the 
twenty-five years last past, in which the great and agitating dis- 
cussions of slavery took place. During the war, when there was 
such a subsoiling of this country, there was displayed such an 
energy and activity of its people as they had never before dis- 
played. Never before were there twenty-five years in which 
there were such tremendous agents employed for instruction ; 
never before were there such instruments of enlightenment 
brought to bear upon us. 

And that which is indicated in the increase of books is carried 



308 OUR HATIONAL JUBILEE. 

out in the increase of newspapers and magazines, not only, but 
in the increase of machinery, and agriculture, and art, and the 
mechanical business of life. The impulse toward power and 
fruitfulness was never so eminent as it was during those twenty- 
five years in which the rights of men were the fundamental ques- 
tions that were discussed, and in which we proved the sincerity 
of the North and the weakness of the South. 

Thus far we have spoken of the condition of the common peo- 
ple and their various institutions. Let me say, in passing, one 
word on that subject which from my very profession it might 
be thought that I would mention first, and which on that very 
account I only glance at, lest I should seem to give undue promi- 
nence to that profession. The state of religious feeling in this 
country is more advanced to-day, by many and many degrees, 
than it has been in any period anterior to this. 

When the Ohio River, the mountain snow melting, swells up 
to the measure of its banks, and begins to overflow and over- 
flow, the big Miama bottoms are one sheeted field of water ; 
and where I once lived — in Lawrenceburg, Indiana — I could 
take a boat and go twenty-five miles straight across the coun- 
try, so vast was the volume. Now, suppose a man had taken 
a skiff and gone out over the fields and plumbed the depth and 
found only five feet of water, and had said, " Ah ! only five feet 
of water, and the Ohio had forty feet." Well the Ohio has not 
shrunk one inch. There are forty feet there and there are five 
feet everywhere else. Religion used to be mainly in the church, 
and men used to have to measure the church in order to know 
how deep the religion was ; but there has been rain on the 
mountains and the moral feeling that exists in the community 
and in the world has overflowed the bound of the church, and 
you . cannot measure the religious life or the religious impulse 
of this people, unless you measure their philanthopy, their 
household virtue, and the general good will that prevails be- 
ween classes and communities. 

The church is not less than it has been, it is more than it 
ever was, but outside of it also there is a vast volume of that 
which can be registered under no head so well as under that 
of religious influence, and which never existed in days gone by 



ORATION REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 3G9 

to the extent to which it exists now. I am one who, although 
I am a servant of the church, a minister within her bounds, 
whenever I look out of her windows and see hundreds of good 
men outside, am not sorry. I thank God when I see a better 
man in a denomination that is not my own than I see in my 
own denomination. I thank God when I see virtue and true 
piety existing outside of the church, as well as when I see it 
existing inside of the church. I recognize the hand of God as 
being as bountiful, and I recognize his administration as being 
as broad as the rains or the sunshine. God does not send to 
Peekskill just as much sunshine as you want for your com and 
rye and wheat. It shines on stones and sticks and worms and 
bugs. It pours its light and heat down upon the mountains 
and rocks and everywhere. God rains not by the pint nor by 
the quart, but by the continent. Whether things need it or 
not, he needs to pour out his bounty, that he may relieve him- 
self of his infinite fullness. 

And so it is in the community. Never before was there 
so much conscience on so many subjects as there is to-day. 
I know there is not always enough conscience to go around. 
I know tnere are men whose consciences are infirm on cer- 
tain sides. I "know that in the various professions there are 
many places where there are gaps, or where the walls are too 
low. But the cultivation of the conscience is an art. 

Conscience is a thing that is learned. No man has much 
more conscience than he is trained to. So the minister has his 
conscience ; it is according to the training that he has had ; and 
it is thought to be fair for him to hunt a brother minister for 
heresy, though it would not be fair for him to hunt him for 
anything else. A lawyer has his conscience. It is sometimes 
very high, and sometimes very low. As an average, it is very 
good. The doctor has his conscience, and his patients have 
theirs. Everybody has his conscience, and everybody's consci- 
ence acts according to certain lines to which he has been drilled 
and trained. Right and wrong are to the great mass of men 
as letters and words. We learn how to spell ; and if a man 
spells wrong, and was taught in th;it way, nevertheless it is his 
way of spelling. And so it is with men's consciences. 



N < 



370 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Now, I aver that mere lagislative conscience is genius. Not 
one man in a million has a sense of what is right end wrong ex- 
cept as the result of education and experience. No man in com- 
plex circumstances has a conception of justice and rectitude by 
a legislative conscience. The great mass of men — teachers and 
taught — are obliged to depend upon the revelations of experi- 
ence to enable them to determine what is right and wrong. 
They have to set their consciences by the rule of the experiences 
which they have gone through. 

I aver, not that the conscience of this people is a perfect con- 
science, and not that it does not need a great deal of education, 
but that, such as it is, it is better and higher and more universal 
than it was at any other period of the hundred years that have 
just gone by. I would rather trast the moral sentiment of the 
community now on any question of domestic policy, or on any 
question of legislative policy, than at any earlier period in the 
history of America. I would rather trust the moral judgment 
and common sense of the millions of the common people, within 
the bounds of their knowledge, than the special knowledge of 
any hundred of the best trained geniuses that there are in the 

land. 

This is not true in respect to those departments of knowledge 
which the common people have never reached. There is no 
common sense in astronomy, because there is no common knowl- 
edge in astronomy ; the same is also true of engineering ; but 
in that whole vast realm of questions which do come down to 
men's board and bosoms, the moral sentiment of the great mass 
of the common people is more reliable than the judgment of the 
few. In all those questions there is a common conscience and a 
common moral sense ; and I say that the average moral sense 
and conscience of the community never were so high as they are 
to-day ; and to-day they are at such a hight in the common 
people as to be safer in them than in any class in the community. 
This has been a gi-eat gain in the last hundred years. 

Let me once more call your attention to some of the elements 
of growth that have taken place in this nation. I was one of 
those whose courage never failed except in spots. Before the 
war I did have some dark days, in which I felt as though this 



ORATION REV. HENRY WARD BEECSER. 371 

nation was going to be raised up merely to be the manure of 
some after nation, being plowed under. It seemed to me as 
though all the avenues of power were in the hands of despotism ; 
as though a great part of humanity was trodden under foot; as 
though every element that could secure to despotism a continu- 
ance of its power had been seized and sealed; and I did not see 
any way out — God forgive me ; but those very steps which made 
the power and despotism of Slavery daugerous were in the end 
its remedy and its destruction. 

This great North had long, partly from necessity and partly 
from a misguided and romantic patriotism, encouraged and pro- 
moted that which was the caries of free institutions, the bane of 
liberty, and the danger which threatened the continent in all 
after times. But when at last the nation was aroused, it smote 
not once, nor twice, but, according to the old prophet, seven 
times; and then deliverance was wrought. The power of a na- 
tion is to be judged by its resistance to disease. All nations 
are liable to attack; but the real power of a nation is shown in 
its ability to throw off disease — in its resiliency. The power 
of recovery is better than all soundness of national constitution. 
It is better than anything else can be. America has arisen 
from a fifth-rate power; but she looks calmly and modestly over 
the ocean, and is a first-rate power among the nations to-day. 
She was a democracy; the people made their own laws; they 
levied and collected their own taxes; and it was said, " Of course 
they will not allow themselves to be taxed more than they want 
to be." We were not a military people; Europe told us so. 
Great Britain told us so. They told me so to my face; and I 
said on many a platform, with an audience like this: "You do 
not understand what democratic liberty means. Wait till this 
game is played out, and see what the issue is." And what is 
the issue of the game ? To a certain extent, the political econ- 
omy of the South gave her aid in the beginning; and the po- 
litical economy of the North gave her inexhaustible resources. 
The genius of the northern people is slow to get on fire, and 
hard to put out; so that we had to learn the trade of war. We 
had learned every trade of peace already, and when once wg had 
learned the trade of war, the power of the North was manifest, 



372 OUR NATIONAL JUBlLEfi. 

to the honor and glory of our religion, of our political faiths, 
and of the whole training of our past history. 

But there was ^something more dangerous than war. An 
insidious serpent is more dangerous than a roaring lion — if the 
lion does not jump before he roars. Repudiation threatened 
more damnation to the morals of this nation than ever war did 
with all its mischiefs; and I want to record, to the honor of our 
foreign population, of whom it is often said, " When you come 
to a great stress, when questions are to be settled on principles 
of rectitude and truth, they will be found wanting " — I want to 
record to the honor of the population that we have borrowed 
from Europe, the fact that when the question came, " Shall this 
nation pay every dollar which it promised, and by which it put 
the boys in blue into the field ?" it was through the West and 
the Northwest, the foreign vote together with the vote of our 
own people, that carried the day for honesty and for public 
integrity. 

Now t , for a democratic nation that owns everything — the gov- 
ernment, the law, the policy, the magistrate, the ruler ; that can 
change ; that can make and unmake ; that has in its hands al- 
most the power of the Highest to exalt one and to put down an- 
other 1 — for such a nation to stand before the world and show 
that this great people, swarming through our valleys and over 
our mountains and far away to either shore, and without the 
continuity necessary to the creation of a common public senti- 
ment, were willing to bear the brunt of a five years' war and to 
be severely taxed, down to this day, and yet refuse to lighten its 
burdens in a way that would be wrong and dishonorable — that 
will weigh more in Europe than any test that any nation is able 
to put forth, for its honor, its integrity, its strength, and its 
promise of future life. 

Look back, then, through the hundred years of our national 
history. They are to me like ascending stairs, some of which 
are broader, some narrower, some with higher rising, and some 
with less than others ; but on the whole there has been a steady 
ascent in intelligence, in conscience, in purity, in industry, in 
happiness, in the art of living well individually, and in the 
higher art of living well collectively, and we stand to-day higher 



ORATION — REV. HENRY WARD BEECHER. 373 

than at any other time. Our burdens are flea-bites. We have 
some trouble about money. I never saw a time when the most 
of the population did not. We have our trouble because there 
is too much in some places and too little in others. The trouble 
with us is like the trouble in winter, when the snow has fallen 
and drifted, and leaves one-half of the road bare, while it is piled 
up in the other half, so that you cannot get along for the much 
nor for the little. But a distribution will speedily bring all 
things right — and I think we are not far from the time when 
that will take place. So soon as we touch the ground of univer- 
sal confidence, so soon as wo stand on a basis of silver and gold — 
then, and not an hour before then, will this nation begin to 
move on in the old prosperity of business. 

I determined not to say anything that could be construed as 
an allusion to party politics, and what I have said cannot be so 
construed ; for both sides around here say that they are for re- 
sumption. The only difference is, that one party say that they 
are for resumption, and the others say, that they are for re- 
sumption, as soon a* we can have it. Well, I do not- see how 
anybody can say anything more. You cannot resume before 
you can. 

Fellow-citizens, in looking back upon the past, it is not right 
that we should leave the sphere and field of our remarks with- 
out one glance at the future. In another hundred years not 
one of us will be here. Some other speaker, doubtless, will 
stand in my place. Other hearers will throng — though not 
with more courtesy, nor with more kindly patience than you 
have — to listen to his speech. Then on every eminence from 
New York to Albany there will be mansions and cottages, and 
garden will touch garden along the whole Eden of the Hudson 
River Valley. But it does not matter so much to us, who come 
and go, what takes place in the future, except so far as our in- 
fluence is concerned. When a hundred years hence the untelling 
sun, that saw Arnold, and Andre, and Washington, but will not 
tell us one word of history, shall shine on these enchanted hills 
and on this unchanging river — then it is for us to have set in 
motion, or to have given renewed impulse to those great causes, 
intellectual, moral, social, and political, which have rolled our 
prosperity to such a hight. 



374 OCR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

To every young man here that is beginning life let me say : 
Listen not to those insidious teachers who tell you that pat- 
riotism is a sham, and that all public men are corrupt or cor- 
rupters. Men in public or private life are corrupt here and 
there, but let me say to you, no corruption in government 
would be half so bad as to have the seeds of unbelief in public 
administration sown in the minds of the young. If you teach 
the young that their Chief Magistrates, their Cabinets and their 
representatives are of course corrupt, what will that be but to 
teach them to be themselves corrupt ? I stand here to bear 
witness and say that publicity may consist with virtue, and 
does. There are men that serve the public for the public, though 
they themselves thrive by it also. I would sow in your minds 
a romance of patriotism and love of country that shall be next 
to the love which you have for your own households ; and I 
would say to every mother that teaches her child to pray, Next 
to the petition, " Our Father which art in heaven," let it learn 
this aspiration : Our Fatherland ; and so let our children grow 
up to love God, to love man, and to love their country, and to 
be glad to serve their country as well as their God and their 
fellow men, though it may be necessary that they should lay 
down their lives to serve it. 

"- I honor the unknown ones that used to walk in Peekskill and 
who fell in battle. I honor, too, every armless man, every 
limping soldier, that through patriotism went to the battle-field 
and came back lame and crippled ; and bears manfully and 
heroically his deprivation. What though he find no occupation? 
What though he be forgotten ? He has in him the imperisha- 
ble sweetness of his thought : " I did it for my country's sake." 
For God's sake and for your country's sake, live and you shall 
1 live forever. 



OUR NOBLE HERITAGE. 

A35T ORATION BY HON. GEORGE W. CURTIS, 

DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION, NORTHFIELD, STATEN 
ISLAND, N. Y., JULY 4tH, 1875. 

Mr. President, Fellow-citizens, Neighbors, and Friends : — 
On the 19th of April, 1115, when Samuel Adams well called 
the father of the Revolution, heard the first sbots of the British 
upon Lexington Green, he knew that war had at last begun, 
and full of enthusiasm, of hope, of trust in America, he exclaim- 
ed with rapture, " Oh? what a glorious morning.'' And there is 
no fellow-citizen of ours, wherever he may be to-day — whether 
sailing the remotest seas or wandering among the highest Alps, 
however, far removed, however long seperated from his home, 
who, as his eyes open upon this glorious morning, does not re- 
peat with the same fervor the words of Samuel Adams, and 
thank God with all his heart, that he too is an American. In 
imagination he sees infinitely multiplied the very scene that we be- 
hold. From every roof and gable, from every door and window 
of all the myriads of happy American homes from the seaboard 
to the mountains, and from the mountains still onward to the 
sea, the splendor of this summer heaven is reflected in the starry 
beauty of the American flag. From every steeple and tower in 
crowded cities and towns, from the village belfry, and the 
school-house and meeting-house on solitary country roads, ring 
out the joyous peals. From countless thousands of reverend 
lips ascends the voice of prayer. Everywhere the inspiring 
words of the great Declaration that Ave have heard, the charter 
of our Independence, the scripture of our liberty, is read aloud 
in eager, in grateful ears. And above all, and under ah, pulsing 
through all the praise and prayer, from the frozen sea to the 
tropic gulf, from the Atlantic to the Pacific, the great heart of a 



376 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

great people beats in fullness of joy, beats with pious exultation> 
that here at last, upon our soil — here, by the wisdom of our 
fathers and the bravery of our brothers, is founded a Republic, 
vast, fraternal, peaceful, upon the divine corner- stone of liberty 
justice and equal rights. 

There have indeed been other republics, but they were foun- 
ded upon other principles. There are republics in Switzerland 
to-day a thousand years old. But Uri, ^chwyz and Unterwal- 
den are pure democracies not larger than the county in which 
we live, and wholly unlike our vast, national and representative 
republic. -Athens was a republic, but Marathon and Salamis, 
battles whose names are melodious in the history of liberty, were 
won by slaves. Rome was a republic, but slavery degraded it 
to an empire. Venice, Genoa, Florence, were republican cities, 
but they were tyrants over subject neighbors, and slaves of aris- 
tocrats at home. There were republics in Holland, honorable 
forever, because from them we received our common schools, 
the bulwark of American liberty, but they too were republics of 
classes, not of the people. It was reserved for our fathers to build 
a republic upon a declaration of the equal rights of men ; to make 
the Government as broad as humanity ; to found political insti- 
tutions upon faith in human nature. "The sacred rights of 
mankind," fervently exlaimed Alexander Hamilton, " are not to 
be rummaged for among old parchments or musty records; they 
are written as with a sunbeam in the whole volume of human 
nature, by the hand of Divinity itself." That was the sublime 
faith in which this century began. The world stared and sneered 
— the difficulties and dangers were colossal. For more than 
eighty years that Declaration remained only a Declaration of 
faith. But, fellow-citizens, fortunate beyond all men, our eyes 
behold its increasing fulfillment .The sublime faith of the fathers 
is more and more the familiar fact of the children. And the 
proud flag which floats over America to-day, as it is the bond of 
indissoluble union, so it is the seal of ever enlarging equality, 
and ever surer justice. Could the men of that earlier day, could 
Samuel Adams and all his associates have lived through this 
amazing century to see this glorious morning, as they counted 
these teeming and expanding States, as they watched the ad- 



OBATION GEORGE W. CUUTIS. 377 

vance of republican empire from the Alleghanies through a coun- 
try of golden plenty, passing the snowy Sierras and descending 
to the western sea of peace, as they saw the little spark of politi- 
cal liberty which they painfully struck, blown by the eager 
breath of a century into a flame which aspires to heaven and 
illuminates the earth, they would bow their reverend heads at 
this moment, as Adams and Jefferson bowed theirs fifty years 
ago to-day; and the happy burden of their hearts would trem- 
ble from their expiring lips, " Now, oh Lord, let thy servants de- 
part in peace, for their eyes have seen thy salvation." 

But we have learned, by sharp experience, that prosperity is 
girt with peril. In this hour of exultation we will not scorn the 
wise voices of warning and censure, the friendly and patriotic 
voices of the time. We will not forget that the vital condition 
of national greatness and prosperity is the moral character of 
the people. It is not vast territory, a temperate climate, ex- 
haustless mines, enormous wealth, amazing inventions, imperial 
enterprises, magnificent public works, a population miraculous- 
ly multiplied ; it is not busy shops and humming mills, and 
flaming forges, and commerce that girdles the globe with the 
glory of a flag, that makes a nation truly great. These are but 
opportunities. They are like the health and strength and talents 
of a man, which are not his character and manhood, but only 
the means of their development. The test of our national great- 
ness is the use we make of our opportunities. If they breed ex- 
travagance, wild riot and license — if they make fraud plausible 
and corruption easy — if they confuse private morality, and de- 
bauch the public conscience, beware, beware ! for aU our pros- 
perity is then but a Belshazzar's feast of splendor, and while we 
sit drunken with wine and crowned with flowers, the walls of 
our stately palace are flaming and crackling with the terrible 
words of our doom. 

But with all faults confessed, and concessions made, with all 
dangers acknowledged and difficulties measured, I think we may 
truly say that, upon the whole, we have used our opportunities 
well. The commanding political fact of the century that ends 
to-day, is the transcendent force and the recuperative power of 
republican institutions. Neither the siren of prosperity, nor the 



378 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

red fury of civil war, has been able to destroy our Government 
or to weaken our faith in the principles upon which it is found- 
ed. We have been proud, and reckless, and defiant ; we have 
sinned, and have justly suffered, but I say, in your hearing, as, 
had I the voice, I would say in the hearing of the world to-day, 
that out of the fiery furnace of our afflictions, America emerges 
at this moment greater, better, truer, nobler, than ever in its 
history before. 

I do not forget how much is due to the political genius of 
the race from which we are so largely sprung. Nine-tenths of 
the revolutionary population of the country was of English 
stock. The Declaration of Independence was a fruit of Magna 
Charta, and Magna Charta grew from seed planted before his- 
tory in the German forest. Our friend, the historian of the 
island, in the interesting sketch of this town that he read us, 
tells us that Northfield was the most patriotic town in the county 
during the Revolution, and that the original settlers were, in 
great part, of German stock. The two facts naturally go to- 
gether. The instinct of individual liberty and independence 
is the germ of the political development of that race from which 
also our fathers sprung. They came from England to plant, 
as they believed, a purer England. Their new England was to 
be a true England. At last they took arms reluctantly to de- 
fend England against herself, to maintain the principles and 
traditions of English liberty. The farmers of Bunker Hill were 
the Barons of Runnymede in a later day, and the victory at 
Yorktown was not the seal of a revolution so much as the 
pledge of continuing English progress. This day dawns upon 
a common perception of that truth on both sides of the ocean. 
In no generous heart on either shore lingers any trace of jeal- 
ousy or hostility. It is a day of peace, of joy, of friendship. 
Here above my head, and in your presence, side by side with 
our own flag, hangs the tri-color of Prance, our earliest friend, 
and the famous cross of England, our ally in civilization. May 
our rivalry in all true progress be as inspiring as our kinship is 
close ! In the history of the century, I claim that we have done 
our share. In real service to humanity, in the diffusion of in- 
telligence, and the lightening of the burden of labor, in benefi- 



OEATION GEORGE W. CURTIS. 31 9 

cent inventions — yes, in the education of the public conscience, 
and the growth of political morality, of which this very day sees 
the happy signs, I claim that the act of this day a hundred 
years ago is justified, and that we have done not less, as an In- 
dependent State, than our venerable mother England. 

Think what the country was that hundred years ago. To- 
day the State of which we are citizens contains a larger popu- 
lation than that of all the States of the Union when Washing- 
ton was President. Yet, New York is now but one of thirty- 
eight States, for to-day our youngest sister, Colorado, steps in- 
to the national family of the Union. The country of a century 
ago was our father's small estate. That of to-day is our noble 
heritage. Fidelity to the spirit and principles of our fathers 
will enable us to deliver it enlarged, beautified, ennobled, to 
our children of the new century Unw r avering faith in the ab- 
solute supremacy of the moral law ; the clear perception that 
well-considered, thoroughly-proved, and jealously-guarded in- 
stitutions, are the chief security of liberty ; and an unswerving 
loyalty to ideas, made the men of the Revolution, and secured 
American independence. The same faith and the same loyalty 
will preserve that independence and secure progressive liberty 
forever. And here and now, upon this sacred centennial altar, 
let us, at least, swear that we will try public and private men by 
precisely the same moral standard, and that no man who di- 
rectly or indirectly connives at corruption or coercion to acquire 
office or to retain it, or who prostitutes any opportunity or po- 
sition of public service to his own or another's advantage, shall 
have our countenance or our vote. 

The one thing that no man in this country is so poor that he 
cannot own is his vote ; and not only is he bound to use it hon- 
estly, but intelligently. Good government does not come of 
itself ; it is the result of the skillful co-operation of good and 
shrewd men. If they will not combine, bad men will ; and if 
they sleep, the devil will sow tares. And as we pledge our- 
selves to our father's fidelity, we may well believe that in this 
hushed hour of noon, their gracious spirits bend over us in 
benediction. In this sweet summer air, in the strong breath 
of the ocean that beats upon our southern shore ; in the cool 



380 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

winds that blow over the Island from the northern hills ; in 
these young faces and the songs of liberty that murmur from 
their lips ; in the electric sympathy that binds all our hearts 
with each other, and with those of our brothers and sisters 
throughout the land, lifting our beloved country as a sacrifice 
to God, I see, I feel the presence of our fathers : the blithe he- 
roism of Warren, and the unsullied youth of Quincy : the fiery 
impulse of Otis and Patrick Henry : the serene wisdom of John 
Jay and the comprehensive grasp of Hamilton : the sturdy 
and invigorating force of John and of Samuel Adams— and at 
last, embracing them all, as our eyes at this moment behold 
cloud and hill, and roof and tree, and field and river, blent in 
one perfect picture, so combining and subordinating all the 
great powers of his great associates, I feel the glory of the pre- 
sence, I bend my head to the blessing of the ever-living, the 
immortal Washington. 



BENEDICTION BY REV. S. G. SMITH, 

DELIVEBED AT THE CLOSE OF THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION, NORTH- 
FIELD, STATEN ISLAND, N. V., JULY 4tH, 1876. 

May the blessing of our father's God now rest upon us. As 
in time past, so in time to come, may He guard and defend 
our land. May He crown the coming years with peace and 
prosperity. May He ever clothe our rulers with righteousness, 
and give us a future characterized by purity of life and in- 
tegrity of purpose. May He everywhere shed forth the benign 
influence of His spirit, and to the present and coming genera- 
tions vouchsafe the inspiring hopes of His gospeL through Je- 
sus Christ, our Lord. Amen. 



THE FUTURE OF THE HUMAN RACE. 

AN ORATION" BY EX-GO V. HORATIO SEYMOUR. 

DELIVERED AT ROME, N. Y., JULY 4:TH, 1876. 

I do not come before you merely to take part in a holiday af- 
fair, nor to excite a passing interest about the occasion which 
calls us together. While my theme is the History of the Valley 
of the Mohawk, in speaking of it the end I have in view is as 
practical as if I came to talk to you about agriculture, mechan- 
ics, commerce or any other business topic. 

There is in history a power to lift a people up and make them 
great and prosperous. The story of a nation's achievements 
excites that patriotic pride which is a great element in vigor, 
boldness and heroism. He who studies with care the jurispru- 
dence of the Old Testament, will see that this feeling of rever- 
ence for forefathers and devotion to country is made the sub- 
ject of positive law in the command that men should honor 
their fathers and their mothers. But sacred poetry is filled 
with appeals to these sentiments, and the narratives of the Bible 
abound with proofs of the great truth, that the days of those 
who fear them shall be long in the land which God has given 
them. All history, ancient and modern, proves that national 
greatness springs in no small degree from pride in their his- 
tories, and from the patriotism cherished by their traditions 
and animated by their examples. This truth shines out in the 
annals of Greece and Rome. It gives vitality to the power of 
Britain, Prance, Germany and other European nations. The 
instincts of self-preservation led the American people in this 
centennial year to dwell upon the deeds of their fathers and by 
their example to excite our people to a purer patriotism, to 
an unselfish devotion to the public welfare. 

The power of history is not confined to civilized races. The 
traditions of savage tribes have excited them to acts of self- 



S82 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

sacrifice and heroism, and of bold warfare, which have extorted 
the admiration of the world. The Valley of the Mohawk gives 
striking proofs of this. The Iroquois, who lived upon the 
slopes of the hills which stretch from the Hudson to the shores 
of Lake Erie, called themselves by a name which asserted that 
they and their fathers were men excelling all other men. Ani- 
mated by this faith which grew out of their legends, they be- 
came the masters of the vast region stretching from the coast 
of the Atlantic to the banks of the Mississippi, from north of 
the great Lakes to the land of the Cherokees. 

Unaided by arts, without horses or chariots, or implements 
of war, save the rudest form of the spear and the arrow, they 
traversed the solidary forest pathways, and carried their con- 
quests over regions, which in extent have rarely been equaled 
by civilized nations with all the aids of fleets, or the terrible en- 
gines of destruction which science has given to disciplined ar- 
mies. History gives no other example of such great conquest 
over so many enemies or difficulties, as were won by the Iro- 
quois, when we take into account their limited numbers. Does 
any man think that all this would have been true if they had 
not been stirred up to a savage but noble heroism by the tradi- 
tions of their tribes ? 

The power of history over our minds and purposes is intensi- 
fied when we stand amid the scenes of great events. Men cross 
the ocean and encounter the fatigues, dangers of a journey to 
the other side of the earth, that they may walk through the 
streets of Jerusalem, or look out from the hill of Zion, or wan- 
der amid sacred places. These scenes bring to their minds the 
story of the past in a way that thrills their nerves. Or, if we 
visit the fields of great battles, the movements of armies, the 
thunder of artillery, the charge, the repulse, the carnage of war, 
the ground strewed with dead or dying and slippery with blood, 
are all presented to our imaginations in a way they can not 
elsewhere be felt or seen. 

If beyond the general inter( st of history which incites to na- 
tional patriotism, and in addition to the scenes of events which 
stir our blood when we move among them, we know that the 
actors were our fathers whose blood flows in our veins, we then 



ORATION EX-GOV. HORATIO SEYMOUR. 383 

have acting npon us, in its most intense form, the power of the 
past. Patriotism, and love of the land in which we live ; a 
pious reverence for our fathers, all unite to lift us up upon the 
highest plane of public and of private virtue. 

The men and the women of the valley of the Mohawk meet 
here to-day not only to celebrate the great events of our coun- 
try, but to speak more particularly about deeds their ancestors 
have done on these plains and hillsides, and then to ask them- 
selves if they have been true to their country, to their fathers 
and themselves by preserving and making known to the dwel- 
lers in this valley and to the world at large its grand and varied 
history. Have they been made household words ? Have they 
shaped the ambitions and virtues of those growing up in the 
fireside circle ? Have they been used to animate all classes in 
the conduct of public and private affairs ? 

Just so far as the dwellers in the valley of the Mohawk have 
failed in these respects, they have cheated and wronged them- 
selves. They have failed to use the most potent influence to 
elevate their morals, intelligence and virtue. They have not 
brought themselves within the scope of that promise which re- 
ligion, reason and experience show, is held out to those who 
honor their fathers, and incite themselves to acts of patriotism 
and lives of public and private devotion, by keeping in their 
minds the conduct of the good and great who have gone before 
them. 

Let the events in this valley during the past three centuries 
now pass in review before us. Its Indian wars, the mission- 
aries' efforts, animated by religious zeal, which sought to carry 
religion into its unbroken forests and wild recesses ; the march 
of the armies of France and England, with their savage allies, 
which for a hundred years made this valley the scenes of war- 
fare and bloodshed ; the struggle of the revolution, which 
brought with it not only all the horrors ever attendant upon 
war, added to them the barbarities of the savage ferocity that 
knows no distinction of age, sex or condition, but with horrible 
impartiality inflicted upon all alik.l.ue tortures of the torch 
and tomahawk. "When these clouds had rolled away through 
the pathways of this valley, began the march of the peacefid 



^84 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

armies of civilization which have filled the interior of our 
country with population, wealth and power. The world has 
never elsewhere seen a procession of events more varied, more 
dramatic, more grand in their influences. 

The grounds upon which we stand have been wet with the 
blood of men who perished in civilized and savage war. Its 
plains and forests have rung with the war cry of the Iroquois, 
and have echoed back the thunder of artillery. Its air has been 
filled with the smoke of burning homes, and lighted up by the 
flames of the products of industry, kindled by the torch of ene- 
mies. Let this scene impress your minds while I try to tell the 
story of the past. With regard to the savages who lived in this 
valley, I will repeat the statements which I made on a recent 
occasion, and the evidence which I then produced in regard to 
their character. 

We are inclined to-day to think meanly of the Indian race, 
and to charge that the dignity and heroism imputed to them 
was the work of the novelist rather than the proof of authentic 
history. A just conception of their character is necessary to 
enable us to understand the causes which shaped our civiliza- 
tion. But for the influence exerted by the early citizens of this 
place upon the Iroquois, it is doubtful if the English could 
have held their ground against the French west of the Alle- 
ghanies. In speaking of them the colonial historian Smith 
says: 

" These of all those innumerable tribes of savages which in- 
habit the northern part of Ameiica, are of more importance to 
us and the French, both on account of their vicinity and war- 
like disposition." 

In the correspondence of the French colonial officials with 
Louis the Great, it is said : 

" That no people in the world, perhaps, have higher notions 
than these Indians of military glory. All the surrounding na- 
tions have felt the effects of their prowess, and many not only 
become their tributaries, but are so subjugated to their power, 
that without their consent-^they dare not commence either peace 
or war." 

Colden, in his history, printed in London, in 1747, says : 



ORATION EX-GOV. HOKATIO SEVAIOUR. 385 

The Five Nations think themselves by nature superior to the 
rest of mankind, and call themselves " Onguekonwe," that is, 
men surpassing all others. 

This opinion, which they take care to cultivate in their chil- 
dren, gives them that courage which has been so terrible to all 
nations of North America, and they have taken such care to im- 
press the same opinion of their people on all their neighbors, 
that they on all occasions yield the most submissive obedience to 
them. He adds ; I have been told by old men of New Eng- 
land, who remembered the time when the Mohawks made war on 
their Indians, that as soon as a single Mohawk was discovered 
in the country, these Indians raised a cry from hill to hill, A 
Mohawk ! a Mohawk ! upon which they all fled like sheep before 
wolves, without attempting to make the least resistance, what- 
ever odds were' on their side. All the nations round them have 
for many years entirely submitted to them, and pay a yearly 
tribute to them in wampum. 

We have many proofs of their skill in oratory and of 
the clearness and logic of their addresses. Even now, 
when their power is goue, and their pride broken down, they 
have many orators among them. I have heard in my offi- 
cial life speeches made by them, and I have also listened to 
many of the distinguished men of our own lineage. While the 
untutored man could not arm himself with all the facts and re- 
sources at the command of the educated, yet I can say that I 
have heard from the chiefs of the Five Nations as clear, strong 
and dignified addresses as any I have listened to in legislative 
halls or at the bar of our judicial tribunals. Oratory is too sub- 
tle in its nature to be described, or I could give to you some of 
the finest expressions in Indian addresses. 

They did not excel merely in arms and oratory, they were a 
political people. Monsieur D. La Protiere, a Frenchman and an 
enemy, says in his history of North America : 

" When we speak of the Five Nations in France, they are 
thought, by a common mistake, to be mere barbarians, always 
thirsting for blood, but their characters are very different. They 
are indeed the fiercest and most formidable people in North 
America, and at the same time are as politic and judicious as 



386 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

well can be conceived, and this appears from their management 
of all affairs which they have not only with the French and 
English but likewise with almost all the Indians of this vast 
continent." 

As to their civil polity, Colden says in 1747: 

" Each of these nations is an absolute republic by itself, and 
every castle in each nation is governed in all public affairs by 
its own sachems or old men. The authority of these rulers is 
gained b} r and consists wholly in the opinion the rest of the 
nation have of their integrity and wisdom. Their great men, 
both sachems and captains, are generally poorer than the com- 
mon people, and they affect to give away and distribute all the 
presents or plunder they get in their treaties or in wars, so aa 
to leave nothing to themselves. There is not a man in the 
members of the Five Nations who has gained his office other- 
wise than by merit. There is not the least salary or any sort 
of profit annexed to any office to tempt the covetous or sordid, 
but on the contrary every unworthy action is unavoidably 
attended with the forfeiture of their commissions, for their 
authority is only the esteem of the people, and ceases the 
moment that esteem is lost." 

In the history of the world there is no other instance where 
such vast conquests were achieved with such limited numbers 
without superiority of arms. More than two hundred years 
ago, when the New England colonies were engaged in King 
Phillip's war, commissioners were sent to Albany to secure the 
friendship of the Mohawks. Again, in 1G84, Lord Howard, 
Governor of Virginia, met the sachems of the Onondagas and 
Cayugas in the Town Hall of Albany. These councils by the 
governors and agents of the colonies became almost annual 
affairs. The power of Colonel Peter Schuyler with the Iroquois 
at this day was deemed of the utmost importance by the crown. 
Perhaps no other man in our history exerted so great an in- 
fluence over the course of events which shaped the destinies of 
our country. For he was a great man who lived and acted at 
a time when it was uncertain if French or English civilization, 
thoughts and customs would govern this continent. He and 
the chiefs who went with him to England were received with 
marks of distinction and unusual honor by Queen Anne. 



ORATION EX-GOV. HORATIO SEYMOUR. 38? 

The Hollanders were the first Europeans who were brought 
in contact with this people. 

Before the Pilgrims had landed at Plymouth Rock, they had 
made a settlement on the Hudson, where the capital of our State 
now stands. At that time, the most commercial people of the 
world, their ships visited every sea, and they were accustomed 
to deal with all forms of civilized and savage life. In pursuit of 
the fur trade they pushed their way up the stream of the Mo- 
hawk, and by their wisdom and prudence made relationship 
with the Indians along its banks, which was of the utmost im- 
portance in the future history of our country. 

The influence which the Hollanders gained while they held 
the territories embraced in New York and New Jersey was ex- 
erted in behalf of the British Government, when the New Nether- 
lands, as they were then called, were transferred to that power. 
In the long contest, running through a century, known as the 
French war, the Dutch settlers rendered important service to 
the British crown. The avenues and rivers which they had dis- 
covered penetrating the deep forest which overspread the coun- 
try now became the routes by which the armies of France and 
England sought to seize and hold the strongholds of our land. 
The power which could hold Fort Stanwix, the present site of 
Rome, the carrying place between the Mohawk and the waters 
which flowed through Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence, would 
control the great interior plains of this continent. If France 
could have gained a foothold in this valley, the whole region 
drained by the St. Lawrence and the Mississippi reaching from 
the Alleganies to the Rocky Mountains, would have been her's. 
Our history, usages, government and laws would have been 
changed. 

He who will study European events for a hundred years be- 
fore our revolution will be struck as to the uncertainties, as to 
the result. For a century the destinies of this continent vibrat- 
ed with the uncertainties of the battle-fields of Europe. The 
cricis of our fate was during the reign of Louis the Great, when 
that ambitious and powerful monarch sought to extend his do- 
minion over two continents. When Marlborough won victories 
at Blenheim, Ramilies and Malblaquet, or when Prince Eugene 



388 OtJB NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

swept the French from Italy and crippled the power of France, 
they did more than they dreamed of. They fought for the pur- 
pose of adjusting the balance of the nations of Europe ; they 
shaped the customs, laws and conditions of a continent. But 
the war was not confined to the Old World. 

Standing upon the spot where we now meet we could have 
seen a long successien of military expeditions made up of painted 
warriors, of disciplined soldiers, led by brave, adventurous men, 
pushing their way through deep forest paths or following, with 
their light vessels and frail canoes, the current of the Mohawk. 
But arms were not the only power relied upon to gain control. 

The missionaries of France, with a religious zeal which out- 
stripped the traders' greed for gold, or the soldiers' love for 
glory, traversed this continent far in advance of war or com- 
merce. Seeking rather than shunning martyrdom ; they were 
bold, untiring in their efforts to bring over the savage tribes to 
the religion to which they were devoted, and to the government 
to which they were attached. Many suffered tortures and 
martyrdom, in the interior of our State, and on the banks of the 
Mohawk. There are not in the world's history pages of more 
dramatic interest than those which tell of the efforts of diplomacy, 
the zeal of religion, or the heroism in arms of this great contest, 
waged so many years in the wilds of this country. If I could 
picture all the events that have happened here, they would invest 
this valley with unfading interest. Its hillsides, its plains, its 
streams are instinct with interest to the mind of him who knows 
the story of the past. It should be familiar in every household. 
But the grand procession of armies did not stop with the ex- 
tinction of Indian tribes, or of French claims. 

When the revolutionary contest began, the very structure of 
our country made the State of New York the centre of the 
struggle, and the valleys of the Hudson and the Mohawk, the 
great avenues through which war swept in its desolating course. 
It was most destructive here, for it brought all the horrors of 
Indian warfare. It is said that there was not one home in all 
this region which did not suffer from the torch or the tomahawk. 
Fortunately it was inhabited by a brave, hardy and enduring 
race, trained to meet and overcome the hardships of life. The 



ORATION EX-GOV. HOEATIO SEYMOUR. 380 

homes of their fathers had been destroyed in Europe by the 
armies of France. The Germans brought here by the British 
Government during the reign of Queen Anne were placed between 
the English settlements and the savage tribes, because, among 
other reasons, it was said that their trials and sufferings had 
fitted them to cope with all the dangers of border life. 

When we have thus had passed in review before us the bands 
of painted savages, the missionary armed only with religious 
zeal, and shielded alone with the insignia of his sacred calling; 
the gallant armies of France and Britain ; the hasty array of our 
Revolutionary fathers as they rallied in defence of their liberties, 
we have then only seen the forerunners of the greatest move- 
ment of the human race. 

With our independence and the possession and the mastery 
of this great continent began a struggle unparalleled in the his- 
tory of the world. Peaceful in its form, it has dwarfed in 
comparison the mightiest movements of war. Its influence up- 
on the civilization of the people of the earth, has thrown into 
insignificance all that modern victories and invasions have done. 
During the past hundred years there has been a conflict between 
the nations of Europe on the one hand, and our broad land and 
political freedom on the other It has been a contest for men 
and women — for those who could give us labor skill and strength. 
We count our captives by millions. Not prisoners of war, but 
prisoners of peace. Not torn by force, but won by the blessings 
which the God of nature has enabled us to hold out to them in 
our fertile hills and valleys and plains. What were the hordes 
of the Persians? What were the array of the crusaders ? What 
the armies of earth's greatest conquerors, in comparison with 
the march of the multitudes of immigrants from the Atlantic, 
States or from Europe who have moved through the valleys of 
the Hudson and the Mohawk, the very gateways of our country 
seeking homes in tne interior of our continent ? Ours is a double 
victory, unlike war, which kills or enchains. It draws our op- 
ponents to our side, and makes them co-workers in building up 
our greatness and glory. As the men of every civilized race are 
pouring through our valley, we sse before us the mightiest ele- 
ments which are shaping the future of the human race. 



390 



OUlt NATIONAL JUBILEE. 



What are all the problems of European diplomacy compared 
with these movements passing before us? All their recent wars, 
in the changes they have made are insignificant in comparison 
with the power we have gained by immigration alone. That 
procession of events, beginning with Indian warfare, and stretch- 
ing through three centuries of battles for the possession, and 
the wars for the independence of our country, grows in import- 
ance and magnitude ; and we see no end to its column as we 
look down into the dim future. The courses of the Mohawk 
and Hudson will ever be its greatest avenues. For here com- 
merce pours its richest streams, and immigration leads its 
greatest armies. We are bewildered when we try to trace out 
the growth of the future. Each rolling year adds more than a 
million ; each passing day more than three thousand ; each 
fleeting hour more than one hundred to our numbers. The 
tide will swell still higher in the future. 

I was once asked by a. distinguished Englishman if we did 
not make a mistake when we severed our relationship from the 
British people? I told him that we were sometimes sorry that 
we let them go ; that our mere increase hi twenty-five years 
would exceed in numbers the population of Great Britain ; that 
the British Isles would make glorious States of our Union ; and 
that we needed them as outposts on the European shores. I 
was able to say this under the circumstances without violation 
of courtesy, and it was pleasantly received by a man whose 
mind was large enough not to take offense at the remark, 
which served to place the progress of our country in a strong 
light. 

I have thus hastily sketched the interest which attaches to 
the whole course of the Mohawk Valley, with the view of throw- 
ing light upon the question which I put at the outset. Have 
we who live amid these scenes been true to ourselves, and true 
to our forefathers, by making this history an animating influ- 
ence to promote the public welfare ; to instill honorable pride 
in family circles, or quicken the minds with generous thoughts, 
which otherwise would have been elull and cold and sordid ? 
The characters of men depend upon the current of thoughts 
which are passing through their minds. If these are ennobling, 



ORATION — KX-GOV. HORATIO SEYMOUR. 391 

the man is constantly lifted up ; it matters not what his con- 
dition may be in other respects. 

If these are debasing, he will constantly sink in the scale of 
morals and intellect ; it matters not what wealth or learning 
he may have. What men think not only in the hours study, 
but at all times and places, in the field, in the workshop, in the 
counting-room, makes their characters, their intelligence and 
their virtue. Men's thoughts form and shape them. And 
those which relate to the past are most ennobling. For they 
are unstained by prejudice, and unweakened by sentiments 
which incline to detract from merits of living acbors. We in- 
stinctively think and speak well of the dead. This of itself 
makes us better men. We can so learn the histories of this 
valley, that its scenes shall recall them as clearly and as vividly 
as the pictures upon our walls. We can so stamp them upon 
our minds that its hills and plains and streams will be 
instinct with the actions of those who have gone before us 
that man has done himself a wrong who can look down upon 
the Mohawk ; and not see the drifting along its current the 
savage, the missionary, or the soldier of the past. He who 
dwells upon its traditions ; who can point out where men died 
in the struggles of war, where men suffered martyrdom for 
their faith— the spot where some bold stand was taken for the 
the rights of man and the liberties of country ; he who feels 
the full import of the great movements of commerce and of 
men passing through this valley, certainly has an education 
that will always lift him up mentally and morally. You can 
not imagine a people living here with all these events stamped 
upon their minds, ever present to give food for thought and 
reflection, who will not be animated by a zeal for the public 
welfare, by generous impulses, by a self-sacrificing devotion for 
honor, for religion, for country. There is no teaching so pow- 
erful as that which comes invested with the forms of nature. 
It is that which reaches and tells upon the young and the old, 
the learned and the unlearned alike. Imagine two men living in 
this valley, both familiar with all its features, one well informed 
and the other ignorant of its events ; then tell rae if you believe 
that they can be alike in their moral natures or their value as 



302 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

citizens. In view of what I have thus said we can see why his- 
tory is so potent. We can now see the wisdom, and the mercy 
too, of that command which tells us to honor our fathers and 
our mothers, though for many years and through many gen- 
erations they have slept in their graves. 

There are some reasons why the history of New York is not as 
well-known to the American people as that of other States. It 
has not excited the interest which justly attaches to it. The first 
settlers were Hollanders. When the Dutch made their settle- 
ment on this continent they were superior to other European 
nations, in learning, in arts, in commerce, and in just views of 
civil and religious liberty. Our country is indebted to them for 
many of the best principles of our goverment. But their lan- 
guage is no longer spoken here. In-comers from other States 
and nations exceed then - descendants in numbers, and many of 
the traditions and events of its colonial period have been lost. 
This is true also of the German settlers in the valley of the Mo- 
hawk. The settlers who came into our State after the revolu- 
tion, brought with them the ideas and sentiments of the places 
from which they came, and which, for a long time, have been 
cherished with more zeal than has been shown for the history 
of the State, where they have made their homes. These things 
created an indifference to the honor of New York. So far from 
preserving what relates to its past, in many instances old monu- 
ments have been destroyed, and names obliterated, which, if 
they had been preserved, would have recalled to men's minis 
the most important incidents in the progress of our country. 
Nothing could have been more unfortunate than the acts which 
changed the name of Fort Stanwix to that of Eome, and that of 
Fort Schuyler to Utica. The old names would have suggested 
the circumstances of the French and Revolutionary wars. Of 
themselves they would have educated our people, and would 
have turned their attention to facts which they ought to know, 
but which have been thrown into the shade by terms which mis- 
lead. The existing designations, with their absurd and incon- 
gruous associations, divert the mind from these honorable memo- 
ries. 

The time has come when the people of New York owe it to 



ORATION EX-GOV. HORATIO SEYMOUR. 393 

themselves and to their country to bring forward their records, 
to incite a just measure of State pride, and to elevate our 
standard of public and private virtue by the influence of our 
grand history. 

This should be taught in our schools, discussed, in our journals 
and made the subject of public lectures and addresses. Monu- 
ments should be put up to mark the spots where battles were 
fought and victories won, which have shaped the destinies of 
our country. When this is done, our own citizens, and the mul- 
titudes who traverse our valley, will see that within its limits all 
forms of warfare — that of Indian barbarism, disciplined armies, 
and of naval power have occurred within its boundaries. These 
prove the truth of the remark of General Scott, " that the con- 
fluence of the Mohawk and the Hudson has ever been the stra- 
tegic point in all the wars in which our country has been en- 
gaged with foreign powers." 

This work of making the details of our history known and 
felt by our people should begin in the heart of our State, in the 
valley of the Mohawk. Associations should be formed to pre- 
serve records and traditions that will otherwise be lost. Its old 
churches, which date back to the existence of our government, 
should be held sacred. The minor incidents of personal adven- 
ture, of individual heroism, should be preserved, for these show 
the character of the men and times in which they occur. 

In no other quarter were the rights of the people asserted 
against the crown more clearly, or at an earlier day. It is not 
certain if the blood shed in the Revolution commenced at the 
battle of Lexington, or when the sturdy Germans were beaten 
down and wounded while defending their liberty pole against 
Sir John Johnson and his party. 

I have refrained from want of time from presenting many facts 
and incidents which would give more interest to my address than 
the general statements I have made. Mr. Simms, to whom we 
are deeply indebted for long-continued and zealous researches 
into the history of this valley, has frequently given to the public 
sketches and narratives of great value. I trust the time has 
come when he and others who have labored in the same direc- 
tion, will receive the sympathy and applause to which they are 
entitled. 



394 OUL. NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Shall this centennial year be made the occasion for organiz- 
ing societies in this valley, with a view, among other things, to 
the erection of monuments at different points along the Mo- 
hawk ? I do not urge this as a mere matter of sentiment, but 
because I believe they will promote material welfare as well as 
mental activity and moral elevation. For these are ever found 
in close relationship. This whole region is marked for its ferti- 
lity. It abounds with the material for varied industry, and is 
filled with streams with abundant power to drive all forms of 
machinery. It is in the heart of a great State, close by the 
leading markets of our country, and with cheap transportation 
to those of the world. Many millions in search of homes and 
for places to pursue their varied industry have passed by all 
these. I believe if we had shown the same pride in our State 
that has been exhibited elsewhere; if the minds of our people 
had been quickened, and their patriotism kept bright and burn- 
ing by the examples of our fathers, that the Mohawk valley to- 
day would show a larger measure of power and prosperity than 
now blesses it. These things make a system of education, in 
some respects more active and pervaeling than that of books and 
schools. Subtle in their influences, they are not easily described, 
but they are felt and seen in all the aspects of society. Many 
years ago Congress made a grant to put up a monument over 
the grave of Herkimer. Attempts have been made to have the 
Legislature of our own State to mark in some suitable way the bat- 
tle field of Oriskany. At the last session of the Legislature, the 
senator from Otsego and other members of that body made ef- 
forts to have something done in these directions. For one, I 
am grateful to them for their patriotism and the interest they 
have shown in these subjects. They did their duty when we 
neglected ours. And yet I rejoice in their failure. This pious 
work should be done by the people of this valley. They should 
not wait for strangers to come in to honor their fathers. There 
woidd be little value in monuments put up by mere legislative 
action, and at the cost of the State or national treasury. We 
want on the part of the people the patriotism which prompts, 
the intelligence which directs, the liberality which constructs 
such memorials. We want the inspiring influence which springs 



ORATION EX-GOV. HORATIO SEYMOUR. 395 

from the very efforts to honor the characters of those who have 
gone before us. 

We want that which will not only remind us of the glorious acts 
of the past, but which will incite them in the future. Will the 
descendants of the Hollanders in the county of Schenectady be 
indifferent to this subject ? Are the men of German descent, 
living in Montgomery and Herkimer, willing to have the services 
and sacrifices of their fathers pass into oblivion ? Does no hon- 
orable pride move them to let our countrymen know that their 
homes suffered beyond all others, through the Indian wars and 
revolutionary struggles ? Will they not try to keep ahve in the 
minds of their countrymen the fact that the battle of Oriskany, 
which was the first check given to the British power in the cam- 
paign of Burgoyne, was fought by then' ancestors and that its 
shouts and war-cries were uttered in the German language ? 
Have they less public spirit than the Germans who have lately 
come to our country, and who have put up a monument to 
Baron Steuben ? By doing so they honored one whose relation- 
ships to them were comparatively remote. Is it not true that 
men born in the vaUey of the Mohawk neglect the graves of 
their father s, and forget the battle fields which have been made 
wet with the blood of those of their own lineage ? The county 
of Oneida bears the name of one of the conquering tribes of the 
Iroquois. Upon the banks of the upper Mohawk, which flows 
through its territory, stood Fort Stanwix and Fort Schuyler. 
The former was for a hundred years during the wars between 
France and England, and at the time of our national independ- 
ence, one of the most important military positions in our country. 
Near by was fought the battle of Oriskany, which was a part 
of the contest at Saratoga which won our national independence. 
It was my purpose to give more value to this address, and to 
fortify its positions by presenting many incidents of a nature to 
interest and convince. But my health has not allowed me to 
refer to the proper books and documents for this purpose. I 
have therefore been compeUed to speak more in general terms 
than I intended. What I have said is also weakened by the 
fact that I have not been able to take up and follow out my 
subject continuously and with clearness. 



396 OUR NATIONAL, JUBILEE. 

In particular, I wished to speak at some length of Fort Stan- 
wix, Fort Dayton and Fort Herkimer, but I am unable to do so. 
Much also could be said about the old church at German Flats. 
Built before the revolution, for the Germans of the Falatinates, 
it has associations with the great political and religious strug- 
gles of Europe and America. Standing upon the site of a fort 
stiU more ancient, for it was built at an early period of the French 
war, it was for a long time the outpost of the British power on 
this continent. It has been the scene of Indian warfare ; of 
sudden and secret attack by stealthy savages ; of sudden forays 
which swept away the crops and cattle of feeble settlements ; of 
assaults by the French ; of personal conflicts which mark con- 
tests on the outskirts of civilization. It was the stronghold of 
our fathers daring the revolution. The missionary and the fur 
trader more than three hundred years ago floated by its posi- 
tion in bark canoes, and in these later days millions of men and 
women from our own country and from foreign lands, on canals 
or railroads, have passed by on their way to build up great cities 
and States in the heart of our continent. There is no spot where 
the historian can place himself with more advantage when he 
wishes to review in his mind the progress of our country to 
greatness, than the Old Church at German Flats. Looking 
from this point his perspectives will be just ; all facts will take 
their due proportions ; local prejudices will not discolor his 
views, and he will be less liable here than elsewhere in falling 
into the common error of giving undue prominence to some 
events, while overlooking the full significance of others moro 
important. I hope the subjects of local histories will be taken 
up by our fellow citizens of this region, and the facts relating to 
them brought out and made familiar to us all. 

I said at the outset that I did not come here to-day merely 
to appeal to your imaginations, or only to take part in a holiday 
affair. I come to speak upon subjects which I deem of practical 
importance to my hearers. If I have succeeded in making my- 
self understood, I am sure, if you will look into these subjects* 
you will find that all history, all jurisprudence, all just reason- 
ings, force us to the conclusion that not only does a Divine com- 
mand, but that reason and justice call upon us to honor our 



ORATION — HORATIO SEYMOtJK. 307 

ancestors, and that there is a great practical truth which con. 
cerns the welfare, the prosperity, and the power of all com- 
munities in the words, " Honor thy father and thy mother that 
thy days may be long in the land which the Lord thy God 
siveth thee." 



THE NATION'S JUBILEE. 

AN ORATION BY HON. THOMAS G. ALVORD. 

DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION, SYRACUSE, N. T., 
JULY 4th 1876. 

People of the City of Syracuse and County of Onondaga. — 
We in common with every portion of our wide extended Union, 
have come together to recognize with suitable observance and 
commemoration the solemn act which one hundred years ago, 
gave form, shape and solidity to our government by declaring 
us a nation independent, self-reliant and free. 

In the performance of this duty we might relate the political 
history of the unwise legislation, the oppressive execution of ' 
tyrannical laws, the coercive power of irresponsible government 
which compelled our fathers first to passive, next to armed 
resistance, and finally culminated in a severance of our political 
dependence on the mother country, and gave to us that Declar- 
ation of Independence whose one hundreth anniversary we have 
met to honor. We might rehearse the names and virtues of 
the patriots of the revolution in the forum and in the field, the 
courage, endurance and trials of those who participated in that 
protracted and bloody controversy which ended in making our 
Declaration of Independence a perfect deed, indefeasible, guar- 
anteeing forever to those worthy to enjoy it, the rich inheri- 
tance of a free government. We might portray the battle fields 
of the past, brightening the dark gloom of defeat with the view 
of unflinching courage, indomitable endurance and an undying 
determination to struggle ever for success, and we might paint 
victory as it perched on the banner of our fathers with that 
halo of glory which time has not dimmed, neither will history 
forget the undying results of which, which in the final triumph 
(as we use them) may and we trust will endure for the benefit 
of all mankind, until the last trump shall summons the in- 



ORATION THOMAS G. ALVORD. 399 

habitants of earth to another world, and this habitation of ours 
shall pass away forever. We might content ourselves with a 
plain and simple historical relation of all the events which clus- 
tered around, mingled with and made up the panorama of our 
revolutionary struggle, the intelligence of our people alive to all 
the minutiae of event, individuality and result of that memorable 
period, would lend a glow, kindle an ardor and inspire a joy 
palpable and demonstrative, making bare recital radiant, with 
all the fire of enthusiasm celebrating with mental and phy- 
sical rejoicings, the dry record alone. 

One of the marked features of this year is to be a full historical 
record of each town, city and county of the Union, embracing 
the geographical, municipal and personal history of each ; of 
course more prominently relating of its earlier history, its mark- 
ed and distinguished men and women — its pre-eminence or pro- 
minence in any direction of art, science, intellectual advantages 
or natural specialty ; all these locally preserved in appropriate 
depositories, are to be duplicated and gathered in one mass at 
the seat of the general government to be an ihuminated column 
upon which will be inscribed, " the one hundredth mile of our na- 
tion's progress in the race of peoples toward the ultimate goal of 
humanity.'' 

The duty of performing our portion of that work has also been 
imposed upon me, but with the consent and approbation of 
your Committee, I have deemed best to postpone to another 
period the historical recital contemplated, and you must be con- 
tent with my wearying you with an oration rather than history 
on the present occasion. 

I am impressed with the belief that it would be better to treat 
the subject before us very briefly, but also in a manner different 
from the common acceptation of the necessities of a Fourth day 
of July celebration. I would not have us to lack in all or any of 
the essential demonstrations of a joyful acknowledgment of its 
great significance, and a ringing acceptation of its glorious re- 
sults, but let us endeavor by a calm and conscientious considera- 
tion of our government and ourselves to learn more and bet- 
ter what there is for us to do, to preserve and keep alive all the 
benefits and advantages we have derived from the past, trana- 



400 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

mitting those great blessing undiminished to our immediate suc- 
cessors, aye, not alone to them but also how best we may by pre- 
cept and example, pave the way to an indefinite prolongation 
and increased enjoyment, to the latest time of the legitimate re- 
sults of the solved problem of our national declaration. 

We are one hundred years old to-day ; true that the mental 
strife of contention against and antagonism to aggression com- 
menced earlier, true that organized and bloody opposition, ante- 
dated this day — April 19, 1775, and Lexington physically declar- 
ed as July 4th, 1776, politically decreed the independence and 
freedom of America. 

I repeat, we as a distinct people and nation are one hundred 
years old to-day, we have only to recollect for a moment to find 
however that while we are jubilant and rejoicing, that our eyes 
behold this day, yet in the light of the history of the nations of 
the world, our nation is an infant brought up in a school of 
our own, and setting forth to find our way among the nations 
of the earth in a new and untried pathway ; the peculiar and 
particular form of government which we enjoy, is in every essen- 
tial particular now on trial for the first time ; it is true, that 
theoretical republicanism, attempts at freedom have existed, but 
never in all human history has there been any other govern- 
ment so completely the government of the whole people such 
as ours. 

Kingdoms, principalities and powers enduring for centuries 
have risen, flourished and fallen into decay ; governments to-day 
powerful and great in territorial extent, in wealth and physical 
power, have their record of birth in the " Dark Ages '' — but we 
with a breadth of country surpassed by none — with a population 
in numbers exceeded by few, with an intellectual wealth as 
diffused and distributed among the masses enjoyed by no other 
people — with a physical power fearing no foe — we are but of 
yesterday. 

The vivid memories of many still active and alive to the work 
of the day, reach back almost to the very beginning of our 
Kepublic, and here and there on our soil, men and women yet 
linger whose infant eyes opened to life ere the dawn of our 
nation's morning ; we depend not as others on tradition, on the 



ORATION — THOMAS G. ALVORD. 401 

lays of minstrels or the sayings of the wise men, to rescue from 
the shadowy and dim past, our country's history — it is but of a 
day, and the scenes in cabinet, council and camp, are as familiar 
to all as household words. 

Should we not then pause here and ask ourselves the signifi- 
cant question, why our fathers were successful in the establish- 
ment, and we so far fortunate in the present stability of the 
government of the people by the people, while a long list of 
futile attempts and terrible failures mark every spot wherever 
else the experiment has been tried ; we have to-day among the 
kingdoms of the earth so-called republics, but we know they are 
so only iu name — they lack the essential engredient of equality 
to all men before the law — their masses want an intelligent ap- 
preciation of th ar rights and duties — subject to popular frenzy 
or ambitious personal design, the republics of the past and (I 
am afraid) most of the present have no elements of either 
right, justice, or endurance. 

No ignorant, no indolent, no irreligious people can ever be 
permanently a free people, and I hold that the foundations of 
our nation were laid wide and deep, by intelligence, industry 
and religion, and upon the adherence to and practice of those 
great cardinal virtues by our people depend wholly the stability 
and perpetuity of our government. 

I do not wish to be understood when speaking of the intelli- 
gence, as meaning the mere learning of the school, nor that 
so far as such education is concerned, all should have the high- 
est attainable — what I mean is, a practical and thorough knowl- 
edge of all necessary to make man and women useful — not use- 
less — good citizens, understanding and practicing all the duties 
incumbent upon them for their own good and as parts of fami- 
lies, communities and States — above all else I would have every 
American citizen well grounded in a comprehensive knowledge 
of the theory, principles and by an honest, virtuous and contin- 
uous exercise of his knowledge and his duty as one of the gov- 
ernment as well as one of the governed, so help to form, 
mould and cast public opinion — for upon public opinion alone 
the stability and efficacy of our people, stolidity, strength and en- 
durance to our nation may be enjoyed and perpetuated. 



402 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Indolence engenders vice, disease, poverty, death — labor pro- 
motes virtue, health, wealth and long life — what is true of the 
individual holds good applied to the nation — show me a lazy, 
indolent, shiftless race, and I will show a nation of slaves; if not 
so practically, yet mentally slaves to vice and strangers to virtue. 

Our fathers by hardy toil, by unwearied thought, calculation 
and invention, wrung from the wilderness the bright land you 
gaze on to-day — its great, almost miraculous advancement has 
been owing to the combined action of intelligence and physical 
labor, but that labor, whether of the body or the mind has 
been persistent and unceasing. 

The extent of our territory is greater by far than the whole 
continent of Europe, but our widely scattered population 
scarcely measures a tithe of its teeming multitudes; nature 
while piling up our chains of mountains towards the sky, scoop- 
ing out the habitations of our inland oceans, and scouring wide 
and deep throughout our land, our magnificent net-work of 
water highways, has planted everywhere for the use and enjoy 
ment of educated as well as directed industry in no scanty store, 
the natural mineral riches of every clime and people, every 
known vegetable production is either indegenous, or owing to 
the variety of climate and soil under our control, can Toe trans- 
planted and made to grow in sufficient abundance to feed the 
necessities and supply the luxuries of the world. 

In this land of ours, with such a present inheritance and 
future prospect we are not only blessed above all other people, 
but we have evidently been chosen by an overruling Providence 
to do the great and final work for man's elevation to and per- 
manent enjoyment of the highest civilization to which human 
nature can attain, and it behooves us to shape our action and 
direct our energies towards the earliest realization and not the 
retardation of the completion of this evident design. 

Independent of and radically separated from all other na- 
tions in our governmental policy, seeking no entangling alliance 
with powers, but opening wide our gates to all people who 
desire assimilation with us and enjoyment of our privileges, — 
I hold that we should be, a3 far as possible, — physically as well 
as politically, — independent of and separate from all other 



ORATION — THOMAS G. ALVORD. 403 

people, until at least the common right of a common humanity 
to equality of privilege and position, is universally acknowl- 
edged and accorded. 

Would we keep our inheritance untarnished ? Would we add 
to its worth the wealth of experience and invention ? In thia 
land of ours, where labor ennobles, does not degrade, where 
the changes of worldly position depend upon individual action 
and are as variable as the waves of the restless sea — where the 
legitimate tendency of labor is to elevate and enlighten, and 
not to depress and keep down, let us and our children continue 
to labor to the end, that the blessings following its wise ap- 
plication will endure to the good of ourselves and our country. 

Glance for a moment at one of the results of our comparative 
poverty coupled with our intelligence and willingness to labor 
— in all countries but ours labor ignorant is impoverished and 
helpless with us labor educated is well paid and commanding. 
Other countries through the ignorance of labor are compara- 
tively non-inventive — we by the intelligence and independence 
of labor are incited to invention, and our record in the field of 
useful inventions is a prouder one than the annals of all other 
nations combined can show — it is the outgrowth of our inde- 
pendence of both political and physical need — cherish and fos- 
ter labor, for it is a precious jewel in the diadem of our people's 
sovereignty. 

The body perishes — the soul is immortal. In discussing my 
third proposition — the need of religion in a community for 
the maintenance of perpetuation of republican institutions, I 
must be understood as firmly and conscientiously believing 
that a morality founded upon the belief in a future and higher 
life of the soul, to be more or less moulded by and dependent 
upon virtuous action in the body, is a necessary ingredient in 
the fitness for and possibility of man's enjoyment of a free gov- 
ernment. 

I can not conceive what motive, beyond the sensuous enjoy- 
ment of the passing hour, Avith no thought for that higher and 
better life on earth, ennobling the individual and benefiting his 
kind, can ever inspire to virtuous deeds or heroic action the 
man or woman who believes death is an eternal sleep — the 



404 OUK NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

beauty and simplicity of our Constitution, which with proper re- 
gulations as to the rights of all, leaves to the conscience and 
judgment of each the matter of religious belief aud observance, 
is one of the grandest and most noble precepts of its text and 
character — but with no proscription in its requirements, with no 
sectarian bias in its action, public opinion has so far demanded 
and had in our legislative halls, in our State and National 
gatherings upon all great public occasions, the recognition of 
the need of the countenance and support of an overruling Pro- 
vidence — sad for us, for our children, for our beloved country, 
will that day be when that " altar to an unknown God," erected 
in pagan Athens, shall be overthrown in Christian America. 

More than two hundred years ago on the banks of our beau- 
tiful lake Onondaga, the first banner of civilization was unfurled 
to the breeze — it was the banner of the Cross, and I pray that 
so long as the stars and stripes of our country shall wave over 
us as a nation, the hearts of our people may cling to the emblems 
of an immortal life. 

I would not mar the pleasure or dampen the joy of this happy 
hour by any unkind allusion to the more immediate past, but it 
would seem proper while we are celebrating the birth, we should 
rejoice also over the preservation of our Union. Our recent in- 
ternecine strife was a legitimate result of a want of the practi- 
cal application of the written theory of our Declaration of Inde- 
pendence — in that instrument human rights were made as broad 
as humanity itself, and no clime, race, color or condition of men 
were excluded from the broad and sweeping declaration " All 
men are created equal." It was the practical departure from the 
annunciation of a political axiom which required our return to 
the allegiance due our creed, through the carnage and waste of 
civil war — that strife is over —the victory of principle over sel- 
fishness, though bloody, is Avon, and the nation rejoices through 
its wide extent at the solution is favor of freedom and right, but, 
like all wars, it has left wounds open, dangerous, unhealed — 
not, I trust the wounds of embittered and lasting hate between 
the contending masses, for God in his infinite mercy grant that 
this anniversary may bind Maine to Georgiaiink Virginia with Ca- 
lifornia, not alone with bands of iron, but with bonds of brotherly 



OBATION THOMAS G. ALVORD. 406 

love and loyal submission to the rights of humanity individualized 
as well as compaeted,and that long before another hundred or even 
any years shall have passed in oblivion, shall be buried all recollec- 
tion of the struggle to maintain and preserve our Union, save the 
sweet and undying memory of brave deeds and heroic endurance, 
and the proud recollection, dear alike to sunny South and the 
warm-hearted North — our country is undivided and indivi- 
sible. 

But we are suffering the wounds always inflicted by ruthless 
war — a lower scale of both public and private morality — an 
irksome feeling at lawful constraint — a distaste for honest labor 
— a reckless extravagance in living — a want of recognition of 
moral responsibility, not alone in the administration of public 
affairs, but in the transactions of ordinary business life, and in 
social relations of neighbors and families. 

I warn you, my countrymen, that we must return to the 
primitive virtues of our fathers — education, labor, religion, 
must again take the places of greed, speculation, corruption, 
indolence and vice ? We may talk of the corruption of our 
chosen rulers — we may stand at the street corners, and publicly 
proclaim the venality and crime in high places ; this availeth 
not, what we must first do is — " Physician heal thyself," " Re- 
move the beam from thine own eye ere you cast out the mote 
from your brother." "Purify the fountain that the stream may 
be pure." Under the theory and practice our system of gov- 
ernment, when administered with the spirit and intent of its 
founders, our rulers are the people's servants, and if the people 
are indifferent and corrupt, so likewise will be their rulers — if 
the constituency is active and honest, the government will 
reflect it. 

A desire by the voter to profit pecuniarly and socially by the 
prostitution of political principles to personal ends ; the indis- 
criminate trade by all classes in the enactments of municipality, 
State and nation, engendered by base cupidity either pecuniary 
or personal — above and beyond all the utter neglect by the 
enlightened, educated and wealthy of their sacred miner as well 
as higher political duties — all combine not only to make our 
politics disreputable — but to demoralize and will finally destroy 



406 OUIi NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

our government unless we speedily return more nearly to the 
simple habits, rigid morality, and conscientious respect to all 
political duty which characterized our fathers. 

I have thus very briefly discussed our position and our duty 
on this our hundredth anniversary — I have not considered it 
wise or profitable to rehearse the familiar story of our struggle 
for and success in the achievement of a national existence. I 
have not in studied words p anted the rapid strides in our 
progress as a people. You know it all, and memory would not 
be quickened nor patriotism intensified by any recital of 
mine. 

But I deem it appropriate, before I shall have concluded the 
discharge of the duty imposed upon me, to address more par- 
ticularly the people of my city and my native county. 

On the 4th of July, 1776, our county was the abode of the 
hostile savages, an unbroken wilderness, within whose borders 
no white man had found a home — it remained so until four 
years after our revolutionary struggle, when the first white set- 
tler, Ephraim Webster, sojourned with the Indian, and follow- 
ing in his path others slowly settled within our present bor- 
ders — while true that no hostile army has ever invaded our 
soil — no hearths desolated — no roof-tree obliterated — no 
historic battle-field marked or distinguished our territorial lim- 
its; yet still it is sacred ground. 

As early as 1792, a grateful State, reserving a small portion 
of the land adjoining and surrounding our celebrated salt 
springs, dedicated and allotted the remainder to the surviving 
soldiers of its contingent in the armies of the Revolution ; 
many of those war-worn veterans with their surviving house- 
holds found in long, wearisome and dangerous journey their 
way highther and entered upon the lands alike the recognition 
of and leeward for their services, and the records of not a few of 
the towns of our county, show to-day among their worthiest 
citizens, the honored names of their descendants. 

" Beating their swords into plough shares — their spears into 
pruning hooks," they attacked with the same unyielding cour- 
age, determination and endurance of labor, toil and privation, 
which had marked their struggle for liberty, the native rug- 



OKATION THOMAS G. ALVORD. 407 

gedness of our uubrokeu soil — the lonely cabin of logs their 
dwelling — the biased but tangled wood path their highway, 
they battled with forest-crowned hill and wooden glen, until 
peaceful pasture and yielding grain-field displaced the lair of 
the wild beast and the hunting grounds of the wilder savage. 

We cannot now linger to detail the progress of each passing 
year, to name the conspicuous actor in each scene, but we can 
for a moment contrast the extremes of 1776 and 187(3, look at 
the pictures before us — 1776 the wigwam of the savage and his 
trackless path in tho unbroken forest — 1876, six score thousand 
human souls basking in the sunshine of a free civilization en- 
joying all the social, intellectual and political advantages ever 
yet allotted to humanity. 

Compared with the huts of our fathers— our habitations are 
palaces — they dot every hill top, they nestle in every valley — 
they stand in the seried ranks in our beautiful and growing city, 
and cluster together around the school and the church, in aU 
our smihng and thriving villages — our thrifty husbandmen look 
upon countless herds of lowing cattle — on seas of waving grain 
— on graneries bursting with the rich and bounteous yield of 
their fertile acres; our merchants in their stately marts of com- 
merce gather from the ends of the earth, the produce of every 
soil — the handiwork of savage and civilized — all creations of 
nature and art to satisfy the wants or gratify the tastes of our 
people — the unceasing hum of the manufacturers' wheel, the 
continuous blow of the sturdy artisan and stalwart laborer 
chase solitude from all our borders — our water highwaj^s link us 
with the ocean lakes of our own West, and give us peaceful en- 
trance to that great sea which rolls between us and the land of our 
father's fathers— highways of iron rib our country North, West, 
South, and East — broad avenues run by the door of the hum- 
blest, and commerce with its white wings of peace, has blotted out 
forever the warpath of the savage and the tree-marked way of the 
hardy pioneer. Religion dwells in more than an hundred tem- 
ples of beauty dedicated to the seiwice of the living God. Edu- 
cation from the lordly towers of the princely university to the 
more humble school-house at the cross roads, boasts its many 
habitations. We are the central county of the Empire State, 



408 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

which ranks first in wealth, first in population, first in represen- 
tation among her sister States of our Union. Of sixty, our 
county is seventh in population and wealth, and in the fifth rank 
in State representation. 

The pioneers of our country and their sons have been dis- 
tinguished on every stage of life in all the years of our history 
— side by side with them, many who have here sought a new 
home, a new country, have over and again reflected honor and 
glory on the home of their adoption. Distinction in the pulpit 
at the bar, in the forum, on battle field, in the broad field of 
human endeavor — wherever honor, distinction, wealth and place 
were to be gained — high rank, deserved places of merit and 
worth have been won by many whose earliest training for use- 
fulness and busy life, was by the fireside of their homes among 
the beautiful hills and smiling valleys of our beloved Onondaga. 

I cannot speak to-day of battle scenes or individuals, but we 
know that on many a well stricken field, in many a still and si- 
lent city of the dead, he to-day the mortal remains of hundreds 
of Onondaga's bravest sons, who battling for the right, from 
Bull Run to Appomattox, left their record of bravery and patriot- 
ism in all the conflicts of the late struggle for national existence. 
We rejoice in the life and presence to-day of the brave survivors 
of that terrible conflict. From the Generals with title won on 
the field, to the private soldier whose unflinching valor and 
great endurance fought and won the contest for our second in- 
dependence — all have reflected honor upon and won undying 
glory for the country of their nativity and adoption. 

Children of the soil— adopted sons and daughters of old On- 
ondaga — is this noble heritage of our fathers, this free and 
equal government given us to enjoy by the brave, good and 
wise men of an hundred years ago worth preserving another 
hundred years ? No human being I now address will witness the 
scene at that celebration ; the voice of him who now addresses you 
will be silent in the grave, the beating hearts and active limbs 
of this vast multitude will have gone to their last quiet mor- 
tal sleep forever. The men of the revolution gave us and our 
children this day at the cost of suffering and tears, wounds and 
death. Where are they ? The lasc surviving warrior and 



ORATION THOMAS G. ALVORD. 409 

statesman who stood on the battlements of freedom's citadel 
and conquered for us the banded hordes of tyranny and op- 
pression, has gone to join the hosts of heaven's freemen in 
another and a better world. Can we not take their finished 
work — keep and preserve it untarnished, unbroken, beautiful 
enlarged, and more glorious and endearing, for our children's 
children '? Though dead in the body yet living in the spirit, 
we may then hear, mingling with the rejoicings of 1976, and 
blessings and praise to our names as well as to the deeds 
of our fathers, in that we have made of the talent committed to 
our charge other talents of honor, glory and prosperity for our 
country. 

Let us to this end from this day practice economy, industry 
. — cultivate intelligence, make virtue the rule and guide of our 
private and public life. 

Triumphant armies inscribe their banners with the names of 
their victorious fields of battle. May we give as our legacy to 
the next great anniversary of our country's birth, the stars of 
our nation's banner undimmed — its stripes untarnished, right- 
fully inscribing thereon as our faith kept pure and unsullied — 
our motto, won by our acts — Religion, Education, Free Labor, 
the only sure foundation on which to build, for perpetuity, 
Republican Institutions. 



OUR SUCOESS-OUR FUTURE. 

AN OKATION BY EEV. JOHN P. GULLIVEE, D.D., 
DELIVEBED AT BINGHAMPTON, N. Y., JULY 4, 1876. 

We celebrate to-day one hundred years cf Democratic Gov- 
ernment. We natter ourselves, not without some show of 
reason, that our experiment has been, on the whole, a successful 
one. 

It is true that in other days " the name of commonwealth has 
past and gone," over many 'fractions of this groaning globe." 
It is true that our Republic has only attained the slight vener- 
ableness of a single century. It is true that other democracies, 
far more ancient have at last " deigned to own a sceptre and 
endure a purple robe.'' Still we live, and we console ourselves 
with the thought that our one century has been equal in actual 
development to many centuries of Venice or Rome. 

It is true we have had our enemies, foreign and domestic, and 
we may have them again. But in two wars, one of them of vast 
proportions, we have not only gained victory, but increased 
strength, while in the war of 1812, we certainly lost nothing. 
We have now convinced the world, what our best friends in 
Europe have seriously doubted, that a democracy is capable of 
being converted, in a day, into a military despotism, as effective 
for all warlike purposes, as the citizen-soldiery of Germany or 
the soldier- tenantry of Russia. A government, however loose 
it may seem to the eye of a monarchist, which out of a nation 
of civilians, can summon more than a million of men into the 
field at one time, which can create a navy at call, and iu so doing, 
can revolutionize the whole system of maritime and defensive 
warfare, which can originate amidst the confusion of a struggle 
for national existence, such improvements in firearms as to make 
obsolete the arsenals of the civilized world, and, in four years 
can terminate in complete success, a struggle whose dimensions 
parallel the Napoleonic wars of Europe — a democracy capable 



ORATION — REV. JOHN P. GULLIVER. 411 

of such a military metamorphosis, is at least not to he despised 
as an unwieldy and ungovernable mob. 

It is true that our own body politic has not been at any time 
in a state of perfect health. As a democracy, it has hud its dis- 
eases, some hereditary and chronic and some the result of tem- 
porary indiscretions and excesses. We began our republican 
organization with a large infusion of the ideas of class-aristo- 
cracy from the Northern Colonies, with all the institutions and 
social usages of a race aristocracy at the South, and with the 
crude, wild doctrines of French Red Republicanism strangely 
mingled with both. Our histo\ - y during the century has been 
almost exclusively the record of the throes of the Republic un- 
der the antagonism of these morbid agents. The extraordinary 
force of vitality which our democracy has developed in elimi- 
nating these internal tendencies to disease and dissolution, is 
not the least among the occasions of our solemn exultation to- 
day. Our remedies have, some of them, been constitutional 
and gentle ; others of them, heroic and painful. But they cer- 
tainly Lave been efficacious. We have diseases still. But just 
at this moment they are of the prurient, disgusting sort, morti- 
fying and annoying enough, but only skin deep. 

Surely a nation that found means to eradicate the slow con- 
sumption of social aristocracy, to quell the fiery fever of a 
brigand communism, and to cut out the cancer of slavery, will 
contrive some method of exterminating the insect parasites that 
are now burrowiug over our whole civil service. If the heart of 
the Republic is sound, we need not greatly fear for its cuticle. 
Only, fellow-citizens, let us be prompt in our treatment, for the 
disease is contagious, and it is very irritating ! 

Besides the ills we have or have had, there maybe latent tend- 
encies to disease and decay, that we know not of. But we will 
borrow no trouble to-day. We will hope that the same con- 
stitutional vigor, and the same skill of treatment which have 
served us so well in the past, will, by God's blessing, prove suf- 
ficient for our future needs. Only let us draw largely upon the 
sources of national nourishment — let us keep in vigorous exer- 
cise all our organic functions ; let us become a manly nation, 
instinct in every part with the highest attributes of national 



412 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

life ; then we may defy the inroads of disease ; then the whole 
body, fitly joined together and compacted by that which every 
joint supplieth, shall grow into a perfect state — a state which 

' God shall honor and man shall fear. We rejoice in the health 

I of the Nation on its htmdreth birthday! 

It is also true, to change our figure, that there has been not 
a little occasion for anxiety concerning the frame-work of our 
Ship of State. The model of a ship and the adjustment of its 
various parts to each other, the balance between its breadth of 
beam and its length of spars, the ratio to be observed between 
steadiness and crankness, the precise point where the " clump " 
may blend into the " clipper," is a great nautical problem. The 
blending of all our local sovereignties, from the school district 
and the town meeting, through the counties and the states, into 
one national sovereignty, while yet each retains its distinct and 
characterestic autonomy, I have often compared, in my own 
mind, to that admirable and exquisitely beautiful adjustment, 
which, before the prosaic age of steam, gave us the many- wing- 
ed buds of the ocean — the swift eagles of commerce — skimming 
every sea, and nestling in every harbor. You have seen them, 
with their pyramid of sails, rising with geometrical exactness 
from main to royal, swelling in rounding lines from the fore- 
most jib to the outmost point of the studding-sail boom, and re- 
treating again, pear-shaped, to the stern, each holding to its full 
capacity the forceful breeze, all drawing in harmony, and yet 
each hanging by its own spar, and each under the instant con- 
trol of the master on the deck. Behold, I have said, the Ship 
of a Republican State ! What absolute independence of parts ! 
What perfect harmony of all ! What defined distinction of 
function! What complete unity of action! What an unre- 
stricted individual freedom ! What a steady contribution of all 
to the general result ! and as the graceful hull, courteously bend- 
ing in response to the multifarious impulse, has ploughed proud- 
ly through the waters, the exclamation has risen to my lips, 
" Liberty and Union ; now and forever ; one and inseparable!" 
But the actual existence of this exact balance between the 
National and local Governments, was not always as well estab- 
lished as it is to-day. At the very outset the Southern States, 



ORATION — I; I V. -JOHN f. GULLIVER. 413 

from the four that the National Government would forbid a pro- 
tective tariff, denied the supremacy of the National ever the 
State Government, except during the consent of the latter. 

In the later days of Calhoun, by one of the strangest trans- 
mutations ever known in politics, the same doctrine was main- 
tained,by the same States,for the purpose of resisting a protective 
tariff. Throttled by the strong hand of Andrew Jackson, at that 
time, the monster drew back into his den, only to appear under 
the feeble administration of Buchanan as the champion of slavery. 
The doctrine that the National Government may be left at any 
moment, a floating hulk without canvas, rigging or rudder, the 
statesmanship which would launch a nation into the great ocean 
of human affairs, under the command of some two score of in- 
dependent local governments, may now be laid away in our 
cabinets of moral monstrosities, as a fossil of the past. De 
Tocqueville, the philosopher of Democracy, prophesied forty 
years ago, in this wise : " It a] ipears to me unquestionable, that 
if any portion of the Union seriously desired to separate itself 
from the other States, they would not be able, nor indeed would 
they attempt to prevent it, and that the present Union will last 
only as long as the States which compose it choose to remain 
members of the confederation." That this sagacious and most 
friendly writer on American institutions has in this case proved 
to be a false prophet, is not the least among our many causes 
for congratulation to-day. 

A century of rapid movement and of revolution ; a century 
which has changed the political condition of nearly every nation 
on the face of the earth ; a century during which wj have twice 
met the whole power of the British Empire in arms, and once 
sustained the shock of assault from the combined power of 
slavery at home and in Europe ; a century during which we 
have eliminated from the body politic the most insiduous and 
dangerous diseases ; a century during which we have deter- 
mined questions concerning the relations and functions of our 
concentric cluster of independent democracies of the most rad- 
ical and vital nature ; a century during which our population 
has grown from three millions to fifty millions, our erea of ter- 
ritory extended from one million to four millions of square miles, 



414 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

our manufactures advanced from twenty millions to forty-two 
hundred millions, our agriculture, mining and commerce in- 
creased in a ratio which sets all figures at defiance ; a century 
which has raised us from insignificance, to a position as the fifth 
of the great empires of the world ; a century which in educa- 
tional and religious progress has more than kept pace with our 
material advancement, giving us a proportion of church mem- 
bers to the whole population four times greater than it was at 
the close of the Revolution, and a much larger increase in the 
ratio of liberally educated and well educated persons ; such a 
century we celebrate to-day. Who shall say that we do not well 
to rejoice. Who can fail to exclaim with devout and fervent 
gratification, What hath God wrought ? 

But we should make an unworthy use of this great occasion 
what Does The should we corifine ourselves to a mere childish 
Future Promise? exultation over accomplished facts. A great 
future is extending out before us. What does this experiment 
prove, and how much does it promise ? It is a time for study 
and thought. This centennial year, with its accomplished past 
just rolling out of view, with its present exciting and absorbing 
duty in the election of a chief magistrate, with an immediate 
future promising an unexampled reaction of prosperity, should 
be a year in which men should make great progress in the science 
of society and government. 

We must not fail therefore to note and to admit freely, that 
our experiment has been in some respects an indecisive one. It 
does not prove that a Democratic form of government is neces- 
sarily and everywhere the best form. We are isolated from all 
the leading powers of the world by the intervention of great 
oceans. We entered upon an unoccupied continent. We 
encountered, in the beginniug, no enemies except a few cowardly 
savages. The rivalries of mankind, and their strifes have been 
adjusted upon other fields. While Russia, our comrade and 
contemporary in national growth, has been advancing upon the 
line of effete human civilizations, we have assailed only the forces 
of the wilderness. She has fought wiih men, we with nature. 
She has conquered by the sword ; we by the plough-share. She 
has flourished by diplomacy ; we by enterprise. She is a con- 



ORATION — REV. JOHN P. GULLIVER. 415 

solidated military despotism ; we an extended Democratic Re- 
public. Yet a philosophical statemanship has often declared 
that we are approaching the same goal of empire and power. 
The comparison is full of interest and challenges our closest 
scrutiny. Russia, primarily the soldier, never out of uniform, 
her villages but military camps, her cities vast garrisons, her 
railroads and chauss^s only lines of army communication, is 
yet an inventing, manufacturing, agricultural and emphatically 
a commercial nation. America, primarily a land of peace and 
thrift, has been transformed in a day, into one vast battle field, 
and its rustic as well as its civic population have left the shop 
and furrow at night to appear in the morning assembled in 
armies of Titanic size, armed with the weapons of the Titans, 
while the thunder of their encounter has shaken the astonished 
world. Russia has exaulted autocracy and punished democracy 
as a crime against God and man. America has proclaimed 
universal liberty and held the despot to be the enemy of the 
human race. Yet within the shell of imperial absolution, Russia 
hnlds to-day, as its inheritance from the depths of a Slavic an- 
tiquity, a communal organization which is almost a fac simile 
of a New England township ; while America, beneath its out- 
ward freedom of thought, speech and act, covers a force of pub- 
lic opinion, both national cind local, which few men have the 
courage to defy, and still fewer the strength to resist. 

Under these curiously opposite conditions is the problem of 
the State being wrought out, for the Golden Age which is to 
come. From these diametrically opposite stand points, are the 
two most youthful nations of mankind advancing to the pos- 
session of the Earth. 

Such a comparison between two opposite civilizations serves to 
The Democratic idea show us that democracy, as a form of govern- 
and the Democra- ment may or may not contain the elements of 
tic ideal. freedom and the assurance of stability. In other 

words, the democratic idea, as men have conceived it and em- 
bodied it in governments, may or may not accord with the de- 
mocratic ideal as it is enunciated in the royal law of Christ, and 
as it will one day be seen, embodied in the governments of men. 
Democracies may hide within themselves the seeds of despotism. 



41G OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Autocracies moy nourish the germs of liberty. A democracy, 
■which is administered in the interests of individuals, or of a par- 
ty, or one in which the majority deprive the minoritv of freedom 
of speech and act, through the action of law or the terrorism of 
public opinion, is essentially despotic. There is despotism enough 
exercised within the Republic to-day, which if it had occurred in 
a monarchy would have cost a king his throne, and perhaps his 
life. On the other hand absolationism may be so administered 
that the highest good of every subject shall be sought, and all 
his rights secured, according to the law. " Thou shalt love the 
Lord thy God with all thine heart and thy neighbor as thy- 
self." 

There is then a political democracy, and there is a moral de- 
mocracy. The slow and reluctant translation of the abstract 
ideal into the actual idea, and its expression in governmental 
institutions, is of surpassing interest and importance. 

It is this history which concerns us on this centennial anni- 

Tbe Question of versary. The inquiries which are being discussed 

the Day. to-day from ten thousand rostrums, and which are 

pressing upon the thoughts of millions of men are these and 

such as these. 

What is democracy, as distinct alike from the mob and the 
despot ? 

What is liberty, as limited by law, and contrasted with li- 
cense ? 

What progress had been made up to the fourth of July, 1716, 
in translating this ideal democracy into the thoughts and insti- 
tutions of men ? 

What did the assembly over which John Hancock presided, 
on that memorable morning, achieve for this great thought of 
the ages? 

How has this imperial gem, inherited from our fathers — the 
Koh-i-noor of our political treasures — been cared for by us ? 

Our first answer to these questionings is a radical and sweep- 
ing answer. 

We assert that this perfect ideal of liberty, this basal principle 
of a Democratic State, this Minerva embodying all temporal 
good for man, sprang full armed and perfect from Christianity. 



ORATION — REV. JOHN P. GULLIVER. 417 

" In the iniage of God made He man, male and female cre- 
ated He them," was the first announcement of this seed princi- 
ple of political and social happiness. While the rights and 
needs of the sexes vary, as do those of all individual men and 
of all classes of men, the image of God gives a grandeur of dig- 
nity and consequence to every human being, be his descent, or 
rank, or abilities what they may. "While the king inscribes 
upon the seal of his authority, " By the grace of God, a mon- 
arch over men," while the magistrate, the parent, the master, 
the wife, the husband, and child, may each claim a special 
divine statute as the basis of his rights ; the man, as a man, 
wears the very signet of Jehovah. Like the incarnate Son, he 
has " on his vesture and on his thigh " a name written : A King 
among kings is he, a Lord among lords. 

The inference is direct and clear. A man despised, is God 
blasphemed. A man enslaved, is the glory of God changed 
into a thing of wood, or stone, or into a beast, or creeping 
thing. A man wronged, is God insulted. To hold a man in 
ignorance, is the criino of not retaining God in the knowledge. 
" Inasmuch as ye did it not to one of the least of these, my 
brethren, ye did it not to me," is the malediction, written by an 
invisible hand upon all the banners of war, and over the blood- 
rei skies of every battle-field of history. This is the answer 
to the question, " Whence comes wars and fightings among 
you ?" The Nemesis of the nations has been no other than 
the loving Father of all, avenging his outraged children who 
have cried day and night unto him. "I tell you that he will 
avenge them speedily" is the interpretation given by the Son of 
God himself to the dispensations of war, and agonies, and, 
blood, which has been to wondering philanthropists only a mys- 
tery of iniquity, from the first murder to the last battle. To 
the ideal humanity, to the mm stamped with the divine image, 
God declares, " The nation and the kingdom that will not serve 
Thee shall perish; yea it shall be utterly wasted;" and in that 
word is the whole philosophy of the civil state. The state that 
God perpetuates and blesses is not the state that merely wor- 
ships God, but it is the state that also honors the image of God 
in man. Devotion without humanity may be found in every 



418 our national jubilee. 

idol temple and Mohammedan mosque on earth. But devotion 
without humanity never exalted a nation or saved a single 
human being. The hell of perished, nations, like the hell of 
lost souls, is crowded with the peoples who have cried. " Lord, 
Lord," who have even prophesied in his name, and reared 
their temples like the trees of the forest, and sent up their ori- 
sons like the sons of the forest birds ; but because a man was 
ahungered and. they gave him no land, because a man thirsted, 
and they gave him no springs of water, because man was a 
stranger and they made him a slave, because a man was naked 
and they kept back his wages by fraud, because a man was 
sick and. they left him, as the North American savage leaves 
his worn out father, to perish by the roadside, because a man 
was in prison and they visited him only to add scorn to his 
sorrow, for these things, and such as these, the sentence has 
gone out against the nations — among them, some of the grandest 
and greatest, " Depart from me, ye cursed !" 

What then is a true Democracy? It is the Government 
a True Demo- which honors man as man. It is the Govern- 
cracy. ment which protects all his God-given rights — the 
right to do right, as God may teach him, the right to do good, as 
God may give him opportunity, the right to be good, as God may 
give him grace, and the right to be happy, as God may bestow 
the means of happiness. 

It is a Government which avenges all his wrongs — the wrong 
oft attempted of forcing him into sin ; the wrong of forbidding 
him to do good in the name of Christ ; the wrong of leading 
him, in self-defence, into all bitterness, and wrath, and anger, 
and clamor ; the wrong of robbing him of his Heavenly Father's 
gifts and excluding him from the Heavenly Father's home. 

It is the Government which provides for the development of 
all his faculties, winch educates him, not merely so that he may 
be a money maker, a wages earner, but to be as much of a man 
as God-like a man as he is able and willing to become. 

It is the Government which recognizes and honors all his 
capacities for happiness in every feasable way, making this earth 
beautiful for him, filling his cup with innocent pleasures, uncon- 
taminated by vileness and sin. 



ORATION — KEV. JOHN P. GULLIVEIl. 4 10 

It is the Government which writes on all its banners, which en- 
graves on its seal of State, which re-enacts in the legislative hall 
and administers in the court of justice, the great law of human 
weal. " Thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and 
thy neighbor as thyself." 

And " Liberty," what is that ? It is full encouragement, both 
by negative permission and positive aid, to do that which is 
God-like, and it is equally the utmost possible restraint upon 
whatever is degrading and evil. Any other liberty is the 
liberty given to a child to burn itself in the fire. It is the license 
which is the worst form of cruelty and slavery. 

This is the work of God in history. Toward such a 
God's plan in democracy has all the discipline of the race been 
history. tending. 

De Tocqueville says, " The development of equality of condi- 
tions, is a providential fact, and it possesses all the characteris- 
tics of a Divine decree. My book (Democracy in America) he 
adds, has been written under the impression of a kind of religi- 
ous dread, in contemplation of so irresistible a revolution. To 
attempt to check democracy would be to resist the will of God.'' 

Steadily, though often slowly, has the race been led on to this 
grand consummation. This is the meeting of war, and con- 
quest and revolution. The progress of democracy has in it the 
might of omnipotence. The gravitation of matter which directs 
rivers in their courses, is a feeble agent, compared with the grav- 
itation of love, which directs all the streams of human society 
toward the great ocean of universal order and pmity and joy. 

The history of the gradual introduction of this conception of 
government into men's ininds and of its consolidation into ac- 
tual institutions must be followed by the careful student in the 
quiet of private investigation. 

Suffice it here to say that the first governments of which we 
have any knowledge, were constructed for protection and re- 
straint. They took a defensive attitude against evil rather than 
a positive position in the promotion of good. This defensive 
and aggressive idea has followed government in the family and 
in the State, and very largely in the church down to our day. 
Its gradual elimination and the substitution of the Christian 



420 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

thought, that evil should be prevented rather than punished, 
that men need to be encouraged to be good, rather than be re- 
strained from becoming bad, has proved to be one of the most 
difficult lessons which the race has had to learn. 

We know little of society before the flood. It was probably, 
Primitive however, a grand experiment of the power of mere 
Governments, law and authority in conflict with evil. The chief 
impression which survived the deluge seems to have been that 
the wickedness of man was great on earth. The history of lib- 
erty through these decades of centuries which followed seems to 
be the record of a series of struggles to relax the unjust and 
cruel rigor with which this system of resistance to evil was pur- 
sued. In these struggles the subject was in a state of chronic 
rebellion against the sovereign, the plebeian against the patri- 
cian. Each dynasty and each class, as it gained power, used it 
for itself. Little by little humanity asserted its rights. The in- 
troduction of the Mosaic code was an immense advance which 
we now fail fully to appreciate. Its democratic features were in 
fact the chief study of the founders of this Republic in pohtical 
science. 

The institutions under which we are now living were slowly 
The American elaborated, in the devout study of the word of 
Kepubiic. God, long before the separation from the mother 
country occurred. The Church of Christ, as founded by the 
Apostles, was strongly democratic, and the whole spirit of its 
administration tended powerfully to a revolution in civil gov- 
ernment. Its doctrines all went to exalt the responsibility and 
dignity of the individual soul. Their religion gradually under- 
mined, in the case of our fathers, their preconceived ideas of 
social order and civil government. When the new cirumstancas 
of their colonial condition compelled them to act on new lines. 
They found their convictions antagonism with their prejudices. 
It is said that the compact of the Mayflower seemed almost the 
result of an accident. The ideas of the colonists were strongly 
aristocratic and inclined them to put the whole power into the 
hands of a few. But the men of muscle saw that now they 
were of as much consequence as the men of brains and of cul- 
ture and gentle birth. They firmly put in their claims and 



OEATION REV. JOHN P. GULLIVER. 421 

the leaders, considering the demand, saw that it was just. "Yet 
the spirit of the infant colonies was strongly aristocratic. In 
manners this was seen much more plainly than in laws. The 
story of the punctilous etiquette which was observed in the 
court (as it was called) of Washington, the seating of the New 
England congregations according to social rank, and numerous 
quaint and almost ludicrous customs of the same sort show 
sufficiently the spirit of the age. 

But all this was a matter chiefly of taste and decorum. Deep 
in their hearts these men loved their fellowmen. For humanity 
and for God, they were ready at any moment to lay down their 
lives. Their churches were the real morn of the State. These 
were formed upon the strictest model of the pattern given in 
the New Testament. They were local democracies of which 
the motto was " One is your master, and all ye are brethren." 
Even churches formed upon the pattern of European usage, 
caught the same spirit, and became fountains of a real, if not of 
a nominal democracy. 

It was this tendency to a sort of aristocracy, which was the 
conservative element in the formation of the government. This 
made us a constitutional Republic instead of a Greek or Polish 
Democracy. This was the Federalism of the early days, in 
which the Puritan of New England found himself in hearty 
sympathy with the Episcopalian of Virginia, and the Presby- 
terian of New York. This whole party was violently assuulted 
by the men, whose conception of democracy was that of a gov- 
ernment in which every man should have equal authority, in- 
stead of one in which every man should be equally protected 
and cared for. The Republican party (as the ultra Democrats 
of that day termed themselves,) were bent simply on power for 
the masses. The Federalists were enlisted, with all their heart 
and soul, in the effort to secure order, justice, virtue and hap- 
piness for the masses. 

The contest was intense and bitter beyond any party strife 

Republican and of which we have any recent experience. The 

Federalists Republicans saw in the Federalists a reproduction 

of their oppressors in Europe. The Federalists saw in their 

opponents, the devils incarnate, who had just then closed the 



422 OUK NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

reign of terror in France. Both were wrong, so wrong that 
only this tremendous antagonism could have restrained either 
from making a wreck, of the new ship of state. The result 
was, that a substantial triumph was with the Federalists, who 
really created the Constitution, while the seeming victory was 
with the Republicans, who after the administrations of Wash- 
ington and Adams gained undisputed possession of the Gov- 
ernment. Thenceforward it became an offense akin to treason 
to question the perfection of the Constitution, while it was 
little short of a personal insult for a politician to charge his 
opponent with having been a Federalist. 

It was the fashion fifty years ago to speak of this Constitu- 
tion as almost a miracle of human wisdom. Of late there seems 
to be a disposition to regard it a very common place affair. 
The estimate of fifty years ago is much more nearly correct. It 
was a miracle not only of human wisdom, but of Divine teach- 
ing. It was the frujt of centuries of the teaching and training 
of mankind. It was the product of no one mind or class of 
minds. It was the result of Providential circumstances quite 
as much as of human thought. It was the work of many cen- 
turies and of many men. It was the work of God as well as of 
men. It was the practical embodiment of the great law of love, 
in the civil state. It was by far the best translation the world 
had ever seen, or has seen as yet, the great ideal of democracy 
— the Utopia of Christianity — into actual institutions and prac- 
ticable government. 

The next great advance of democracy in this country is seen 
in the overthrow of the institution of slavery. If I pass by this 
whole history with a mere mention here, you will understand that 
it is because of the familiarity of the subject to the men of our 
day, and not because it was not a most extraordinary, a most in- 
structive, a most important victory for the rights, both of mas- 
ter and slave, and for the weal and progress of mankind. 

Now we stand on the mount of vision. The past extends 
back, reaching into the farthest depths of history, studded more 
and more thickly as we approach our modern era, with the 
monuments of victory for justice, law and freedom. It is a 
magnificent and an inspiring spectacle. It is well that we celebrate 



OKATION — REV. JOHN P. GULLIVER. 423 

this anniversary of freedom, as John Adams predicted we should 
do, " with thanksgiving, with festivity, with bonfires and illumi- 
nations." 

But we should be unworthy sons of heroic sires, if we did not 
The Present look about us, in the surroundings of the present, and 

Dnty inquire if there is not something to be done, as well 
as something to be enjoyed. 

Men and brethern, I do but follow the example of the men of 
a hundred years ago, when I bid you pause in the midst of your 
rejoicings to-day ; when I ask you to consider whether an in- 
stant and a deadly peril be not concealed, like a worm in the 
rose, beneath the fair blossoming of this hour; when I ask you 
if it is not certain that, unless there be radical, sweeping, uncom- 
promising reform in the administration of our Government, if it 
is not certain that we are celebrating the first and the last cen- 
tennial of the American democracy. Such, fellow-citizens, is 
my profound conviction, and out of the abundance of my heart 
I speak to you to-day. 

The time was, in the days of Washington and the elder Adams, 
and the same continued to be substantially true to the close of 
the administration of the younger Adams, that an officer of the 
Government, employed in its administration, who should actively 
engage in its construction, through the elections, would have 
been regarded as guilty of an impropriety — a misdemeanor, a 
dishonorable unworthy act, similar to that judge in our day 
who should appear as an advocate or a client in a court over 
which he presides. Even at so late a date as the impeachment 
and trial of Andrew Johnson, it was charged as a crime that he 
had given civil appointments for the purpose of strengthening 
his own political position. 

We look back to the otherwise creditable administration of 
Andrew Jackson, and find the first open and acknowledged de- 
parture from this principle. Adams had refused a re-election 
on terms which he regarded subsersive of the government. 
Jackson seems to have yielded with reluctance to a demand 
which the rapacity of many of his supporters forced upon him 
with a fury which marked a complete revolution in public feel- 
ing. To the horror of all right minded men of all parties, Mr. 



424 OUU NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Marcy, of New York, on the occasion of the nomination of Martin 
Van Buren as minister to England, declared in his place in the 
Senate, the revolutionary doctrine, " We practice as we preach. 
To the victors belong the spoils" The horror of the opposing 
party and of all good citizens, gradually changed to acquies- 
cence, and on all sides the principle was accepted as a practical 
necessity. 

The heroic struggle with slavery, which lifted the nation to a 
moral elevation, of the grandest sublimity for the moment, 
checked this downfall in the lowest slums of knavery and pec- 
ulation. But with the close of the war came a temptation and 
an opportunity such as never had been dreamed of, and with 
them -an entire absence both of moral principle and of legal re- 
straint to meet the evil. 

How we stand to-day, how humiliated before our own con- 
sciences and before mankind, I need not pain you by describing. 
You know it all, and you feel it deeply. 

Now what is to be done ? What have I to do, and what have 
you to do ? 

The two great parties have so far recognized the evil and the 
danger, that they have both nominated men who are representa- 
tives of honesty and reform. 

But neither of them has laid down any principles of reform. 
It is not their place to do it. Parties can represent and give 
voice to the principles of the people. But they cannot create 
them. It is for the pulpit, the press, the school, the private 
citizen, to solve the problem, and to hand over its execution to 
the politicians. 

What, then, is the solution of this perplexing problem? I 
hesitate not for an answer. Go back to the ancient traditions 
of the Kepublic ! Make it a disgrace, and as far as possible a 
legal misdemeanor, for any officer engaged in administering the 
Government to interfere with an election. Forbid the legisla- 
tive and judicial departments to have any voice whatever in the 
appointment of an officer of the Executive Department, except 
in a few cases of confirmation by the Senate, acting in its ex- 
ecutive capacity. 

Make it a high crime and misdemeanor for any executive 



ORATION REV. JOHN V. GULLIVER. 425 

officer to remove a subordinate, except for cause. Let a man's 
jmlitics Lave nothing to do with the giving or retaining of of- 
fice. Make it a State's prison offense for a legislator to engage 
in any legislation in which his own interests are directly or in- 
directly concerned. 

The time is propitious for such a reform. The people are 
ripe for it. All the indications are that within ten years they 
will have it. For this let us all labor, Republicans and Demo- 
crats alike. We are just entering on a Presidential canvass, 
under candidates against whom not a word of reproach can be 
breathed. Let us thank God for so much to-day. It is likely 
to be a respectable canvass, in which foul-mouthed abuse will 
be little used. 

Let this Centennial year be distinguished for a victory over 
the most dangerous, but most contemptible foe that ever men- 
aced the Republic. Let the watchword of the next three 
months be — Honesty! Truth! Patriotism! Down with party 
machines and machinists ! Up with the reign of purity, honor 
and integrity ! 

Thus shall the victory of this one hundredth year be worthy 
of the companionship of the victories, of the birthday of the 
Republic. 

Thus shall the men of this generation stand proudly by the 
side of the men of 1776 and the men of 1865. 

Thus shall the Republic, established by the wisdom and sac- 
rifices of the one, and saved by the heroism and blood of the 
other, be handed down to our children, to be incorporated with 
the great empire of liberty and love, which is at last to fill the 
whole earth. 



THE SPIRIT OF 1876. 

AN ORATION BY HON. GEO. W. CLINTON. 

delivered at the centennial celebration at buffalo, n. y., 
jult 4th, 1876. 

Fellow-Citizens : — This holy day itself is full of soul-stirring 
memories and replete with joy. It carries us back to the second 
day of July, 1776, when the Congress of the thirteen colonies de- 
bated and adopted the Declaration of Independence, and to the 
Fourth day of July, when, in firm reliance upon its truth and 
justice, and upon the favor of Almighty God, they signed and 
gave it to the world. The debate has not come down to us, 
but we know that it was vehement, and that some good, brave 
men, shrank from what seemed to them sure self-destruction. 
"We do not wonder that they shrank, but we reverently thank 
God that their timid counsels were overborne by the eloquence 
and firmness of the illustrious signers of that immortal Declara- 
tion — an eloquence and firmness that were not all their own, 
but were heightened, if not imparted, by the indignation of a peo- 
ple who loved liberty more than lands or life, and detested the 
sovereign of Great Britain as the author of all their wrongs. I 
have no time for eulogy. The heroes and the statesman of 
the Bevolution have no need of it. The world yet rings with 
their praises ; their names and deeds are embalmed in history, 
and imperishable fame is theirs. Indeed, if I had time for eulo- 
gy I would rather expend all my poor powers in just praise of 
the people of the thirteen colonies — "the common people" — 
the men and women of all occupations, who, inflamed by a sense 
of injury to themselves and of danger to the liberties of their 
descendants, gave birth and force to the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence, and through suffering and blood maintained it, and 
so, under God, were the true authors of all the blessings we 
enjoy. I do believe that in that great emergency the so-called 
leaders were truly representatives — that they were actuated by 



ORATTON — GEORGE W. CLINTON. 427 

the people— that then, as now, the people, instead of being led> 
were the leaders and inaugurated the glorious revolution. 
Theirs was the chiefest heroism. The orator, inspired by pop- 
ular sentiment, exclaims, " Give me liberty or give me death/ 
and he receives the laurel due to heroism, but the people go 
forth silently and act it in suffering, in battle and in death. My 
heart, I must confess, is rather with the unrecorded than the 
recorded worth and virtue. No warrior ever won fame in bat- 
tle unless supported or urged on by heroic masses. In our 
land there are, I doubt not, thousands, yea, tens of thousands 
of humble or forgotten graves which if mortal ashes be fit sub- 
jects of honor, are as worthy of distinction as are those which 
we have covered with marble and with granite. It was, in my 
poor understanding, the wisdom and heroism of the people, ra- 
ther than those whom we call the fathers of our country that 
made the great war of the Revolution successful and sub- 
lime. 

That war was on principle. A people jealous of their liberties 
felt that taxation without representation was tyranny. They 
looked upon their children, and they thought : " If we submit, 
they will be governed by our dastardly example and bow under 
a heavier yoke ; the colonies will become dependencies and our 
children vassals of the British crown," and so they took their 
arms at Lexington and plunged into what seemed a hopeless 
conflict with great Britain. They had no ally — no assurance of 
foreign aid. But far more was involved in the issue of that con- 
flict than they supposed. They did not, they could not realize 
that they were warring and suffering for the whole human 
family. What wisdom could, in 177G, jjierce the utter darkness 
of the coming century and see our country as it is ? Only God 
could do it, and He, in His gracious providence gave our fathers 
the victory, and guarded and guided the nation to which victory 
gave birth. Give Him the glory ! 

In celebrating this happy day, it would be shameful to forget 
that ultimate success was won, with the aid of many gallant 
friends of freedom from Europe, where Liberty was dead, but 
not the love of her. The name of many of these worthies are 
irrecoverably lost. Holland gave us Steuben, who was so ser- 



428 OUR NATIONAL JDDILEE. 

vicable in the training of our troops. Alsace contributed the 
good De Kalb, who fell, a martyr to liberty, at Camden. Poland 
gave us Kosciusko and Pulaski. 

" Warsaw's last champion " was our champion too. He it 
was who planned the camp on Bemis's Heights, and made our 
lines impenetrable, and so contributed, far more than the skill 
of Gates and the mad bravery of Arnold, to the victory of 
Saratoga and the surrender of Burgoyne. Pulaski did good 
service, raised an independent corps and laid down his life for 
the good cause in the assault upon Savannah. Scotland gave 
us Paul Jones, the hero of our flag and terror and the scourge 
of England on the sea. Thomas Paine, an Englishman, gave 
us wondrous aid and comfort with his pen, and the value of his 
services was publicly acknowledged by Congress and by all 
our foremost statesmen, and after the vindication of our Inde- 
pendence, New Jersey and New York hastened to testify their 
sense of them by gifts of land and money. It seems surprising 
that a man of his ability and worth was not a Christian. He, 
in common with many of our most venerated statesmen, was 
tinged with the falsely so-called philosophy then so widely 
prevalent. His "Age of Reason'' is almost forgotten. His 
assaults upon Christianity were weak and ineffective. Mere 
justice to so efficient a defender of the rights of man requires 
us to remember that his creed, though too contracted, was 
noble — it might have been the creed of Socrates or Plato : " I 
believe in one God and no more, and I hope for happiness be- 
yond this life. I believe in the equality of man ; and I believe 
that religious duties consist in doing justice, loving mercy and 
endeavoring to make our fellow creatures happy." France 
among a host of gallant men, gave us Lafayette. Words can- 
not add lustre to his fame, or exalt him in the hearts of my 
countrymen. 

As Americans we cannot hold D'Estaing and Rochambeau 
in especial honor. The French Government had no love for 
us and no regard for liberty. France became our ally because 
she hated Great Britain and wished to wound her. These were 
the commanders of her navy and her army, through whose co- 
operation Washington was enabled to close the war by the en- 



OKATION — GEOKGE W. CLINTON. 429 

forced surrender of Cornwallis at Yorktown. But it is well to 
remember that, as the stars in their course fought against 
Sisera, so a Providential storm prevented Cornwallis's escape 
and made our victo^ certain and complete. Great Britain ac- 
knowledged our independence, and our narrow country was 
left at peace with all the world. The first Constitution of New 
York was adopted at Kingston in 1777, on the 20th day of April, 
and it seems to me that a proper State pride requires that day 
to be set apart by the good people of the State as a holiday for- 
ever. 

The Articles of Confederation were submitted to the States in 
1777, and, being ratified by the Legislatures were signed by 
their representatives in Congress in 1778. These articles were 
a mere rope of sand, and did not create a nation. It was a 
blessed day for us and for the world when they were replaced 
by the Constitution. That went into effect on the 4th day of 
March, 1788, when Washington duly entered upon the office of 
President. It was the most perfecc Constitution that man ever 
devised. But alas, it presented one dark blot upon its other- 
wise fair face — it did not fulfill the promise of the Declaration 
of Independence and recognize the equality of man. The 
framers of it were compelled to compromise with slavery. But 
that Constitution was a great advance in the direction of lib- 
erty, and gave strength and majesty to this before formless and 
disjointed country, which was born into the world on the fourth 
day of July, 1776. 

From the happy hour of its adoption, through many trials, 
the United States of America has marched gradually onward in 
the paths of glory. Her acquisitions of territory have been 
immense. In 1803, our Government purchased of France, for 
$15,000,000, Louisiana and all her claims to the country west 
of the Mississippi. Thus we acquired not only perfect property 
in the whole length of that great river, but the very heart of the 
continent, and even passed the Kocky Mountains and planted 
our banner upon the coast of the Pacific Ocean. In 1819, 
Spain ceded Florida to us, thus rounding our possessions on 
the Gulf. After a long interval, Texas was annexed, war with 
Mexico followed, and New Mexico and California were added 
to our country. 



430 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

I am proud of the laurels won by my country in her wars ; 
but, thank Heaven she has far worthier claims upon our admira- 
tion and respect. I care not to inquire whether her independ- 
ence was confirmed and her dignity vindicated by the war of 
1812. It is enough to say, that, despite some disaster her 
triumphs upon both land and sea were worthy of our intrepid 
people, and of all those victories I can recall none that was 
more glorious and complete than that which Perry won upon 
the lovely lake that laves the feet at Buffalo. 

Would, my friends ! that I could, with justice to this occasion, 
permit the recent past to be buried in oblivion, and omit all 
reference to the Rebellion — that awful war, the memory of 
which renews my anguish and recalls my fear of something 
worse than death — the ruin of my country. My voice was one 
of the first that demanded war in preference to disunion, though 
I well knew what tremendous evils must come from war how- 
ever thoroughly successful. "War came, and there was great 
bitterness in being compelled by sacred duty to counsel battle 
to the death for the Union and for liberty, while I was debarred 
from sharing the dangers and privations of our soldiers. The 
South, under the influence of slavery, was a mere aristocracy — 
a noble aristocracy, if you please ; but base is the noblest. The 
North and West, with an ineradicable hatred of slavery, had 
been induced to accede to the demands of the South and extend 
its area. One is ashamed to note the ease with which public 
men were swayed by promises and threats of sophistry. This 
cancer, hated as it was by all, or nearly all, the framers of the 
constitution was placed under the protection of the constitution 
and permitted to spread. The slave holding States became 
arrogant. The gods made them mad. Cotton was king. 

They resolved to repudiate the constitution, to recede and 
form a nation, a Republic, by themselves. No wonder that the 
politicians of the South hated the constitution that had so long 
protected them and despised the freemen of the North, who 
were proud to live by their own labor. They could not read the 
Declaration of Independence without a denial of the truths for 
the maintenance of which their fathers and our fathers pledged 
their lives, their fortunes, and their sacred honor. " We hold 



0KAT10N — GEOKGE W. CLINTON. 431 

these truths to be self-evident — that all men' are created equal ; 
that they are endowed by then" creator with certain inalienable 
rights : that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of 
happiness ; that to secure these rights governments are insti- 
tuted among men, deriving their just powers from the consent 
of the governed." Athens, Sparta, all the so-called free States 
of Greece, and the Roman Republic itself were all debased, cor- 
rupted and ruined by slavery. To make liberty stand firm, 
erect and fair upon the bleeding back of slavery is not possible. 
And yet these men, in imitation of the miserable Spartans, pro- 
posed to have their Helots and worship freedom. In their 
madness they would have compassed our ruin and their own, 
and blighted every germ of liberty in Europe. We resisted for 
our lives : we fought for them and for their children as well as 
for ourselves and for our children. Thank God ! we beat them 
down, and kept them from self-niurder. 

We retrieved our national honor. We purified the constitu- 
tion and made it the guaranty of freedom and equality through- 
out our glorious country. Our warfare was in a holy cause, and 
so far as our deep wrongs would permit, was waged without 
enmity. When peace returned, I was among the first to say, to 
a portion of the public, that our duty and the common interest 
demanded that we should take ample security for the future and 
grant full amnesty to all who had participated in the rebellion. 
I spoke in a corner. I was not heard. I hardly expected to 
be heard or heeded, but I satisfied my conscience. We suffer at 
the south as well as here and everywhere the evil consequences 
of the war of the rebellion. We have an immense debt and a 
depreciated currency ; but our chiefest suffering has flowed from 
the demoralization which always dogs the heels of war. Truly, 
we have paid a tremendous price for victory, but the victory 
was worth it a million times. 

In the history of the last century, is it not very clear that God 
has been most gracious to us ? He gave us honorable success 
in all our wars. He made the passions and the wants of trans- 
atlantic powers conduce to the extension of our country. He 
gives us nearly the whole of North America to hold in trust for 
Freedom and for Virtue and as an asylum for the oppressed of 
the world. 



432 OUE NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

When the expansion of our territory threatened to weaken 
the ties of our nationality, new modes and means of intercourse 
by sea and land — steamboats, canals, railroads, ocean steamers, 
and the magnetic telegraph — arose in good time to counter- 
poise the disadvantages of distance and avert the danger. In 
point of time New York is much nearer now to San Francisco* 
than it was to New Orleans less than half a century ago. Free 
institutions — the same in substance — prevail throughout our 
land. Free commerce throughout the immense expanse cements 
our union, and free intercourse and an equal love of liberty 
mould us into one peculiar people. There is not and never has, 
been in all the world a prouder title than " citizen of the United 
States." 

If there be any portion of our country for whose future I fear 
it is the South, it is said, I hope untruly, that there disorder 
to some extent prevails, and that politicians still talk of " the lost 
cause," and seek to rise upon the dying passions of the past. 
But I will not fear. The most loyal men of the South are the 
brave confederates who fought so gallantly against us. The re- 
constructed States must take care of themselves and their own 
interests and honor. If they will destroy themselves, so it must 
be. But surely their wise, good men will counsel their people, 
as ours do us, to submit to the inevitable, and to seek prosperity, 
and happiness, and honor, where alone they are to be found — 
in the firm maintenance of impartial law and the pursuits of 
industiy. 

What wonderful changes in the condition of the world the 
past century has witnessed ! How petty are the evils we com- 
plain of when compared with those under which the whole 
earth groaned a century ago ! When the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence was promulgated, Holland and Switzerland were the 
only Republics in the world, and whether toleration was correct- 
ly understood and practiced in them is not clear. Elsewhere, 
throughout Europe, Africa, Asia and ah the islands of the great 
deep, bigotry reigned, and the many were subservient to the 
few. The people were divided into orders, ranks and castes, and 
the lowest were trodden under foot. Persecution for opin- 
ion's sake was everywhere indulged, and, in general it was 



ORATION — GEORGE W. CLINTON. 433 

cruel, fierce and bloody. Rulers and ruled were alike 
selfish and inhuman. England, from whose law and his- 
tory our ancestors drew their love of freedom, while boasting of 
Liberty, oppressed Ireland and filled her colonies with slaves. 
There was not in the whole world a country so pure, enlightened, 
tolerant and happy as was each and every one of the thirteen 
colonies who jeoparded everything for perfect freedom and the 
rights of man, and gave birth to our country. "What glories 
cluster around the country's history ! How firm and strong she 
is — how pure and lovely — the example of the world, its glory 
and its hope ! Surely our God looks down upon it with appro- 
bation and will bless it. We may well believe that by it He will 
encourage humanity and make the round earth happy, tolerant 
and free. 

Everywhere there has been progress in the arts, in science, in 
government, in everything that elevates the intellect, improves 
the heart and favors freedom. In our land intolerance has no 
existence, and in almost every other country she seems languish- 
ing or dead. Good men of all Christian sects have learned to 
love each other, and to forget their differences in the unity of 
their good works and worship. Childhood is more and more 
dear, women is more elevated and influential, and her refining 
influence is more widely felt. The rights of inferior beings are 
more justly estimated, and the brutes, whether they labor for us 
or not, and the birds that help and cheer us are under the pro- 
tection of the law. The elective franchise now rests upon mere 
manhood, and not upon the accidents of property. The weapons 
and the implements of war are now so destructive and so costly, 
that invasion seems impossible, and wars, when they come, must 
certainly be brief. 

This Centennial year has been marked by many happy events. 
Let me refer to a few of them. The people everywhere have 
evinced a hatred of private and political corruption. It has 
witnessed the detection — may it witness the condign punish- 
ment — of men who have made the public a prey, and the temple 
of liberty a den of thieves. Everywhere in our land great en- 
terprises have been commenced or brought to a successful end. 
In our own dear Buffalo, we may point with just pride to our 



434 bUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

noble City and County Hall, and to the numerous new buildings 
which add beauty to our city, and prove its prosperity and pow- 
er. This year, too, is made famous, by the wonderful Interna- 
tional exhibition at Philadelphia. There, all the nations exhibit 
and compare their natural, industrial, artistic and scientific pro- 
ducts, and learn to know and respect each other, and to appre- 
ciate the inestimable blessings of peace and untrammeled inter- 
course. 

How, my friends, shall we confirm our blessings and manifest 
our gratitude to Heaven ? To Heaven, what can be more grate- 
ful than works of piety and love ? Our liberties are very strong- 
ly rooted, but " eternal vigilance is the price of liberty." " How 
true it is that " Power is continually stealing from the many to 
the few !" Would that every citizen would rouse himself to a 
deep sense of the dignity and responsibility of citizenship ! Ig- 
norance is the ready tool of mean ambition. She longs for license 
and cannot consort in peace with loving Liberty. She may be 
the parent of dangerous riot or bloody revolution, but she can- 
not found a State nor maintain her lawless freedom. Her tri- 
umphs are brief, and she always falls, by craft or force, under 
the foot of despotism. I say, with Jefferson, the author of the 
Declaration of Independence, " above all things educate the 
people:" We have obeyed, and will forever obey the precept- 
And for our obedience have we not a precious reward in these 
one thousand children who sing so charmingly the hymns of 
liberty ; Do they not give us the strongest possible assurance 
that our country and its institutions are secure ? God bless 
you, my good children ! You are the richest jewels of Buffalo — 
the future defenders of purity, liberty and union. 

May our people grow in magnanimity as in every other vir- 
tue. There is a noble, self-denying economy. There is a mean, 
purblind shabbiness which sometimes seeks to commend itself 
under that honorable name. All honest labor is honorable. 

The day laborer and the smutched artificer may be as good 
as anybody, though they have less power to serve the commu- 
nity than those on whom fortune smiles. They are often proud 
and would scorn a life of inglorious ease. Hundreds of poor 
men, in our city, proved their worth last winter by eagerly ac- 



ORATION — GEOKGE W. CLINTON. 435 

cepting public work in lieu of public charity. I am no level- 
ler — no agrarian. It is not the duty of any government to 
provide work for all who desire to work ; but it is the duty of 
every government to encourage industry and promote happi- 
ness, directly or indirectly, whenever it can do so. 

The general and state governments require a vast variety 
and amount of manual and mechanical labor. In times of 
monetary depression, dearth and panic, it is the duty of govern- 
ment to set an example to capitalists maintaining and even in- 
creasing its average expenditures for labor. Shame on the 
miserable demagogue, who preaches as economy a meanness 
which strikes down and disheartens honest laborers. 

I pray you, when economy is preached, see to it that it is just 
and worthy of a great-hearted people ! 

My friends, I cannot tell you bow much pleasure you have 
given me to-day, not only by your kindness to myself, but by 
the sight of your own happy, animated faces, and by your mag- 
nificent procession. The demonstrations of the day are indeed 
sublime. Here is patriotism as pure as the sky above us, and 
irresistible as the surging ocean. The sounds of innumerable 
feet upon the march, the martial music, the intermitting mur- 
murs of great multitudes, with its attempt at silence, are like 
the multitudinous voices of the sea, but grander, far grander. 
The sluggish sea has no soul nor life in its motion and its ut- 
terances ; but the movements and the voices of this vast as- 
sembly are replete with intelligence and soul. 

With so grand a spectacle in view how can we doubt the sta- 
bility of our country and our liberties? Talk of "the spirit of 
1776," and of " the times that tried men's souls !" The spirit of 
1876 animates you, and your souls would, I doubt not, issue 
gloriously from trials as bitter and s vere as those through 
which the heroes of the Revolution passed triumphantly. 
Then, too, our procession, as did the army of the Revolution, 
embraces men of every race and country — native-born Ameri- 
cans, Germans, Irish, English, Scotch, Poles, Frenchmen. But 
who cares where they were born ? They are all Americans, lov- 
ers of the Constitution and the Union, of liberty and law. It 
is hardly fanciful to say that here, in our country, sacred to 



436 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

liberty, the reunion of these races may result in the restoration 
of the primeval type of manhood. 

My countrymen, I ought to stop here, but I cannot cease 
without alluding to the highest enjoyment, the most gracious 
and honorable duty of the day. The Ladies Union Monument 
Association, in conjunction with the Grand Army of the Repub- 
lic, have, we trust, made this day forever memorable by break- 
ing ground for our Soldier's Monument. It is well that they 
who suffered and died for the perpetuation of the Constitution 
and the Union should be honored equally with the soldiers of 
the Revolution. 

The monument should be a triumphal arch, an ornament of 
this proud city, a praise to the noble women who have labored 
so faithf ally for and now insist upon its erection, a fit memorial 
of soldierly and patriotic virtue, an everlasting instance of the 
sublime union of public gratitude and heroic valor ; and we are 
confident that, in due time, the patriotic people of Buffalo will 
provide for the completion of the holy work this day com- 
menced. 



THE EXPERIMENT OF A EEEE GOVERNMENT-- 
A SUCCESS. 

AN ADDRESS BY REV. ARTHUR T. CHESTER, D.D. 

DELIVERED AT BUFFALO, N. Y., JULY 4TH, 1816. 

The nation itself, on this glorious day, the hundreth anniver- 
sary of its Declaration of Independence — the nation established, 
matured, honored — is the most fitting monument to the memory 
of the men who have founded, developed and defended it. We 
say to them all, amid this tumult of joy, as we point to our free 
and happy country, "Behold your work;" and we declare that 
they shall be remembered with gratitude in all the years and 
centuries of the coming time. 

Ye pioneers of liberty, the eloquent speakers and writers pre- 
ceding the revolution, who, with a daring amounting to audaci- 
ty, stirred up the people till they cried out, " We will be free !" — 
ye heroes of the bloody struggle for hberty, attained by victories 
on the battle-field, when England's strength and pride, repre- 
sented by the best trained troops of the world, were conquered 
by a yeoman soldiery ; — ye brave men who resisted to the death 
when, three score years ago, our land was invaded, and the very 
spot on which we stand was the scene of conflagration and blood- 
shed ; — ye patriots of the later time, who, to save your country 
from dismemberment and destruction, left your various pursuits 
of peace for the battle's front, and there gave your lives, or re- 
turned wounded and maimed, or if unhurt, the stronger to re- 
sist other dangers to which your land may be exposed ; ye noble 
men and women, of the first years and of the last years of the 
century, who have counseled and labored and fought and suffer- 
ed and sacrificed and died for the Republic ; ye living and dead 
patriots and soldiers, behold your work ! 

This nation, free and independent, enjoying for itself the rich- 
est blessings of hberty, and exerting its benign influence up< »n 
all the nations of the earth, this American nation, these United 



438 0UB NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

States, this confederation of forty millions of rejoicing citizens, as 
the light of this memorable day dawns upon us, this is your 
monument ! You shall not be forgotten as long as the lakes and 
the gulf and the two oceans enclose the favored inhabitants 
of this free and prosperous Republic. 

The world admires the force and beauty of the inscription to 
the memory of the architect of St. Paul's Cathedral, who is bu- 
ried in its crypt — " Si monumentum requiris, circumspice." We 
use this language to-day, of the three generations, most of whom 
are buried in this toil ; who with infinite labor have laid the 
foundations of this great commonwealth ; who have carried up 
the structure at such cost of life and treasure ; who have set the 
top stone to-day amid the shouts of a grateful people ; who have 
built not a cathedral to vie with the world's proudest structures, 
but have raised up a nation, the peer of all the nations of the 
earth, though these may have been a thousand years in build- 
ing, and this but a hundred ; we say of all these to-day, and 
with what added emphasis, " If you ask for their monument, 
look around j r ou !" 

This monument is now completed. It has often been asked, 
especially at gatherings on the Fourth of July, whether this gov- 
ernment would stand. It has been regarded as an experiment. 
The dangers to which it is exposed have been magnified, and 
fears expressed that it might prove a failure. Let us hear no 
more of this. The question is settled ; the Republic is a suc- 
cess. This day, that with its morning beams marks the begin- 
ning of its hundreth year of life and growth and prosperity, this 
day makes it of age, and is the full assurance that it shall con- 
tinue in the coming years, by the favor of the God of nations, 
and advance in everything that can add to national glory and 
honor. 

What though we look with a degree of sorrow and shame up- 
on the incomplete shaft at our capital, commenced many years 
ago in honor of the father of his country — what though the pa- 
triotic American in Paris, who would pay his respects to the 
memory of La Fayette, that unselfish apostle of our liberties, 
must traverse an unfashionable part of the city, and find the 
mortal remains of the hero in a remote corner of an obscure 



ADDRESS REV. ARTHUR T. CHESTER. 439 

church-yard, covered only by a plain slab large enough to shade 
his coffin, yet have we a completed, a noble monument to these 
and all the heroes of the past, in the very existence and in the 
character of this American nation. Let us hear no language to ~ 
day but that of praise. We need not use exaggerated terms of 
boastful pride, but we may proclaim facts. Shame to us, if we 
do not to-day, rejoice in everything that distinguishes us as a 
nation, and gives us prominence among the nations of the earth. 
"What then is the government of these United States in which 
with glad hearts we rejoice ? It is essentially a democracy, 
as has been well said, a government of the people, and for the 
people, but such a government would be the worst in the world 
— less stable and more dangerous than any form of despotism, 
unless the great mass of the inhabitants were under the control 
of intelligence, virtue and religion. 

There must be general knowledge — a development and ex- 
pansion of that part of man's nature by which he is lifted out 
of the domain of the animal and into the reasonable ; then there 
must be a prevalence of the principles of common justice, and 
a proper regard for the rights of others ; and there must be, in 
some form, a recognition of a sovereign God and His claims as 
related to the issues of eternity, or, the people can only make 
up a lawless, ignorant mob, unable to take care of themselves 
and sure to bring ruin upon all around them. 

We claim, that as a people we always have been and still are 
under the controlling influence of these great principles. We 
foster universal education that we may remain intelligent. We 
furnish at public cost that culture for the masses which is need- 
ful that each succeeding generation may be wise in the knowl- 
edge of important truth, the influence of which is felt in the 
general welfare. We inculcate and enforce a respect for whole- 
some laws, so that it is the aim of all to secure for themselves 
and to administer to others that justice which ensures equal 
rights, and in this respect makes a beggar equal to a President. 
We adopt some form of faith, some mode of worship, that ex- 
presses a belief in our higher nature and in a Supreme Being, 
to whom we are responsible. Upon this triple foundation, gen- 
eral intelligence, reverence for law and faith in God, the Re- 



440 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

public lias been established ; upon these it has been built np ; 
by these it must be perpetuated. And these have been, are, 
and must be, the characteristics of this people. These mark us 
as distinct among the nations. 

In the possession of these, or at. least in their harmonious 
combination and general diffusion, we take rank with the most 
favored and exalted people. We acknowledge none to be su- 
perior — we take precedence of most. We may point to-day 
with becoming pride to our educational institutions, adapted to 
all classes of our citizens, furnishing the highest culture to 
those who desire it, and giving to all, the poorest and the hum- 
blest, the moans of attaining t ) intelligent citizenship. We have 
free schools, a free press, and freedom of opinion and of speech, 
in such a degree as to make us the admiration and the en- 
vy of the people of the civilized world. 

We have such laws and statutes all over the land, State and 
municipal, and such organized courts of various grades as to 
secure the surest and most rapid administration of justice, that 
which is so essential in a community, the basis of which is equal 
rights. 

And we have absolute freedom of religious faith and wor- 
ship — a freedom which has not led to infidelity and atheism. 
All over the land, in city and hamlet, we see the spires of Chris- 
tian churches pointing heavenward, and we hear the solemn 
call of the church bells as the people are summoned every Sab- 
bath to worship in the sanctuary. We have it written in our 
national song. " In God is our trust ;" and when in our last 
great struggle this sentiment stamped itself upon the anxious 
heart of the nation, we put it upon our large coins, and there 
it is to-day, by special enactment, " In God we trust." 

We are a self-governed, intelligent, law-abiding Christian 
nation. This is the monument upon which our eyes now rest 
rising in its symmetry and beauty in commemoration of the pa- 
triotic spirit, the wise counsels and the heroic deeds of all the 
founders and defenders of the Union. W T e can no more think 
or speak to-day of defects and blemishes, of open or concealed 
dangers, than of the spots on the sun's disc, when that glori- 
ous luminary breaks anew upon the darkened earth and is 
bathing all nature in its golden light. 



ADDRESS — REV. ARTHUR T. CHESTER. 441 

With most commendable and characteristic zeal, the ladies 
of Buffalo and vicinity have determined to give outward form 
and expression to the reverence and gratitude we all feel to- 
ward the " founders and defenders of the Union." They have 
chosen a plan of a lofty massive arch, to stand in the most public 
square of our city, spanning our most beautiful avenue. They 
have laid, with great industry, the foundation of a fund to pay the 
cost of the structure, and have invited the citizens of Buffalo to 
join them to-day in beginning the work. What can be more 
appropriate than that on this day, when the gratitude of the 
people has been swelling for a hundred years, it should find an 
outlet, if only so far as to mark the spot, by breaking the 
round where shall be laid at once the deep and wide founda- 
tion of the graceful and imposing pile to be erected upon it. It 
shall always be one of the most interesting features of the 
edifice, as it tells its story of its patriotism and bravery of the 
heroes whose names it bears, and gives its testimony in the 
coming years to the gratitude of the entire people, that it was 
begun on the Fourth of July, 1876. 

And what can be more appropriate than that the women of 
the land should engage in this enterprise. They gave their 
fathers and husbands and sons and brothers and lovers with a 
heroism equal to that of the soldiers who were thus given 
as martyrs for liberty, While war was raging they were most 
industrious in preparing clothing for the soldiers, in scraping 
lint for the wounded, in supplying delicacies for sick. They 
were found on the field and in the hospitals, overcoming the 
shrinkage sensitiveness of their nature, accustoming themselves 
to the sight of gaping wounds and learning to bear without 
dismay the groans of the suffering, in their purpose to be min- 
istering angels to the wounded and the dying. What more 
appropriate now that the clamor of war has ceased and the 
sweet voice of peace is heard in all our border, than that these 
gentle, generous spirits. Anxious to show their patriotism in 
some womanly way at this centennial, should enter upon a 
work like this? May not the fair honor the brave? And 
will not every man who has a spark of patriotism — who 
has any sense of what liberty is worth — who can make any 
estimate of what the nation's life has cost for a hundred years, 



412 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

be ready to respond most cheerfully and generously when 
these zealous women ask for aid ? Let us cry out in earnest 
encouragement : Go on, wives, mothers, sisters ! It is a noble 
work you have undertaken. Here is our offering, before you 
nsk it. What if the times are hard, there would have been no 
times at all but for the labor, the sacrifice, the heroism of those 
whose deeds you commemorate. 

Lay the foundations, build up the arch, crown the completed 
work. You shall not want for means. Every American shall 
furnish at least one stone for the beautiful structure, and our 
adopted citizens will take pleasure in expressing in the same 
way to the heroic men who have prepared such a home for them 
upon the western shores. Shame on the citizen — he is not 
worthy of the name, native or foreign — who, in this year so 
frought with sacred memories, so fall of burning appeals to 
patriotism, and at the call of his fair countrywomen, can refuse 
to make a contribution to such a cause as this ; when, if each 
man and boy in our city alone would give but a dollar, the 
structure would rise rapidly and without interruption, and we 
should soon be gazing upon its majestic beauty. 

A few months ago I stood upon the top of the most magnificent 
arch in the world — the Arch of Triumph in Paris. It is as high 
as our medium church steeples, and commands a splendid view 
of that most beautiful of all cities. But, it was erected to cel- 
ebrate the victories of the Emperor, who made war for its own 
sake, who sought to build up France at the expense or utter 
ruin of other nationalities, who allowed ambition to goad him 
on to a bitter exile and the death of a prisoner. It looks out 
upon a land whose history dates back more than a thousand 
years, but whose government is yet unsettled, because the 
masses are too spirited and liberty -loving to submit quietly to 
the rule of monarchy, and yet are too fickle and unintelligent 
to cultivate a stable republic. 

Our arch — I see it rising in its beauty — its summit towering 
above these lofty trees. I stand upon its eminence and look 
around. It has been erected, not by forced contributions to 
celebrate the bloody victories of a despot who for his selfish 
ends could devastate the inoffensive nations of his day, not only 
in Europe but in the East. It has been built by the free gifts 



ADDRESS — REV. ARTHUR T. CHESTER. 413 

of a generous and grateful people to keep in memory the brave 
deeds and wise counsels of the founders and defenders of the 
Union, and it overlooks a free republic, tells of victories won 
over foreign enemies and over intestine foes, not for the injury < >f 
others, but only for the existence and safety of the country it- 
self. It tells of progress and growth in mechanism, in art, until 
we could invite the world to our shores and force them to confess 
that we had outdone all the nations in our Centennial Exposi- 
tion. 

It tells of a contest, carried on peacefully in the presence of 
these foreign visitors, when it is settled in a peaceful convention 
of each great political party that one of two men, out of forty 
millions, shall be the next President, and both men so able, so 
learned, so good, that, party considerations aside, we do not 
care which shall be successful at the election. 

It tells of freedom for all the inhabitants of the land. AVe 
could not have come to our Centennial with such joy unless 
that dark cloud of slavery had been dispelled, though at such a 
cost. 

The arch looks North and South, to tell our near neigbors of 
another nationality, and through them all the nations, that this 
is the home of the free, and to tell our brethern in the opposite 
direction that we are and must be one people. It is an open 
arch, not a closed barrier. It invites all to come and dwell 
among us, and enjoy in full measure the immunities and privi- 
leges of American citizenship. 

There it shall stand till another century shall come to an end, 
and then, the dear old flag waving over it, its stars doubled, 
nineteen hundred and seventy-six, showing seventy-six shining 
points on its azure field — then our children's children shall tell 
what a noble work of patriotism and loyalty we commenced and 
finished a hundred years before. 

In this faith we now break the surface for the foundation of 
the structure, believing that there is power enough in patriotic 
impulses and in women's pleadings to secure what is necessary 
to complete it, so that by another national anniversary we may 
be summoned to rejoice together in its beauty and grandeur, as 
it declares in plainer language than by an inscription on its walls, 
that at last it has been shown that this republic is not ungrateful. 



CENTENNIAL HYMN, 

BY J. W. BARKER. 

SUNG AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBKATION, BUFFALO, N. Y., JULY 4tH, 1876 

All liail this day immortal 

Upon the scroll of Time ! 
We crowd the shining portal 

Of Freedom's hallowed shrine, 
We come, a ransomed nation, 

With songs of lofty cheer, 
To greet with adoration 

Our first Centennial year. 

Through trial and thro' conflict, 

From danger's darkest night, 
We tread the glowing summit 

Of Freedom's towering height ; 
While in the sky of azure 

The stars of peace appear, 
To crown with rising glory 

Columbia's hundredth year. 

Great Euler of the Nations, 

Thy majesty we own ; 
With songs of glad thanksgiving, 

We bow before Thy throne ; 
Thy wealth of peace possessing, 

So dear to every home, 
We crave our Father's blessing, 

The hundred years to come. 



OUR LAND.-A CENTENNIAL HYMN, 

BY ALFRED B. STREET. 

SUNG AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION AT ALBANY, NEW YORK, 
JULY 4th, 1876. 

On our Centennial Height 
"Warm love and proud delight 

Fill every breast ! 
Blessings, all round, we meet ; 
Praise ! with thy anthems, greet ! 
North to the South repeat ! 

East to the West ! 

Where spreads the Peopled earth. 
Foreboding Freedom's birth, 

Our bright flag glows. 
Bed, for our Battle -sign ; 
White, for our Peace benign ; 
Stars, for our States in Twine ; 

Stripes, for our foes. 

Broad smiles our lofty Land, 
Each side an ocean grand ; 

Snows linked to flowers. 
As our flag blends its dyes, 
So, sons of differing skies 
Find a fixed home to prize, 

In our free bowers. 

To HIM, all bend the knee! 
Shall not the future see 

Greater our clime ? 
Vaster our living tide, 
Harvests and homes allied, 
Knowledge spread far and wide, 

'Till latest time. 



THE TRIUMPHS OF THE REPUBLIC. 

AN ORATION BY HON. THEODORE BACON, OF ROCHESTER, 

DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION AT PALMYRA, N. T.j 
JULY 4th, 1876. 

The occasion which we commemorate to-day, familiar as it is 
to us by its annual recurrence — fixed as it is in our national 
life — is in its very conception distinctive and American. It is 
not the birth-day of a reigning prince, however beloved ; it is not 
the holiday of a patron saint, however revered ; it is simply the 
the festival of our national existence. Unimaginative as we are, 
we have impersonated an idea — the idea of nationality ; and 
the festival of that idea, instead of a man or a demi-god, we 
celebrate to-day. 

And we do right to celebrate it. The fact of this national exist- 
ence is a great fact. The act which first declared the nation's 
right to exist was a great act — a brave act. If it was not in- 
deed, as we have been ready enough to assert, a pivotal epoch 
in the world's history, ic was beyond question a decisive event 
in our own history. If it was not the birth-day of the nation — 
for the nation was born long before — it was the day the still- 
growing youth became conscious of its young maturity, asserted 
its personality, and entered on equal terms h)to the community 
of nations. And whatever errors there may have been in our 
methods — whatever follies of mere deafening or nerve-distract- 
ing noise — whatever mad recklessness with deadly explosives, 
such as will make to-morrow's newspapers like the returns of a 
great battle — whatever flatulence of vain glorious boasting from 
ten thousand platforms such as this — it is none the less a 
goodly and an honorable thing, that the one universal festival 
of this great nation should be the festival of its nation- 
ality alone. This, and this only, is the meaning of our 
being together to-day ; that we are glad, and joyful, and 
grateful, that we are a nation ; and that in unison with more 



ORATION — THEODORE BACON. 44? 

than two-score millions of people, throughout the vast expanse 
of our imperial domains, we may give utterance to the joyful 
and thankful thought, "The Lord hath done great things for 
us, whereof we are glad." 

It is well then, to celebrate and rejoice. The many reasons 
we have for joy and pride are familiar enough to you. If there 
were any danger of your forgetting them, they . are recalled 
annually to your remembrance by addresses such as you have 
honored me by calling on me to deliver here to-day. And in 
considering how I could best respond to your request, in the 
few moments which you can spare from your better occupation 
of the day, I have thought it superfluous to repeat to you those 
glories of which your minds are already so full, deeming it a 
better service to you, and worthier of the day, I suggest certain 
imitations upon national self-laudation. 

Let me recount to you summarily, the familiar and ordinary 
grounds of our boasting on such days as this. Then go over 
them with me, one by one ; consider them soberly ; and see 
whether we are in any danger of exalting ourselves unduly by 
reason of them. 

1. We conquered our independence. 

2. We govern ourselves. 

3. We have enormously multiplied our numbers, and ex- 
tended our boundaries. 

4. We have enormously increased our material wealth, and 
subdued the forces of nature. 

5. Education and intelligence are in an unequaled degree 
diffused throughout our population. 

6. To crown all, we have but just now subdued a gigantic 
rebellion, and in doing so have incidentally suppressed the 
great national shame of human slavery. 

Consider them : 

1. We conquered our independence. 

Beyond doubt, this was a grand thing to do, even in view 
of all the advantages that aided our fathers, and of all the 
difficulties that burdened their enemies. It was not, indeed, 
except in a certain limited and qualified sense, what it is com- 
monly misnamed, a revolution. It was rather a movement of 



448 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

conservatism — of resistance to an innovating despotism, seek- 
ing to impose the bonds of distant authority on those who 
were free-born, and who had always governed themselves. 
This resistance to ministerial Dovelties was in the interest of all 
Englishmen, and, until this very day one hundred years ago, 
was in the name of King George himself, whom we still recog- 
nized as our rightful monarch, after more than a year of flagrant 
war against his troops. It was (do not forget) war of defence, 
against an invader from the paralyzing distance of 3,000 miles ; 
yet that invader was the most powerful nation in Europe. It 
enlisted (remember) the active alliance of France, andstirrred 
up Spain and Holland to separate wars against our enemy ; yet 
even with these great helps, the persistency of the struggle, the 
hardships and discouragements through which it was maintain- 
ed to its final success, were enough to justify the honor in which 
we hold the assertors of our national independence. 

2. We have inherited, it is true, by a descent through many 
generations, certain principles of government which recognize 
the people as the source of authority over the people. Yet not 
even the founders of this federal republic — far less ourselves, 
their century remote descendants, could claim the glory either 
of inventing these eternal principles or of first applying them 
in practice. Before Jefferson were Plato, and Milton, and 
Locke, and Eousseau. Before Philadelphia were Athens, and 
pre- Augustan Rome ; Florence and Geneva ; Ghent and Ley- 
don ; the Swiss Republics and the Commonwealth of England. 
Before the United States of America were the Achsean League, 
the Hauseatic League, and — closest pattern and exemplar — the 
United Provinces of the Low Countries. Beyond doubt, how- 
ever, it is something to be glad of that our ancestors began the 
century which closes to-day, upon the solid foundations of a 
faith in the right of self-government, when so many other na- 
tions of the earth were to be compelled to labor and study to- 
ward the acceptance of that faith, or to legislate and fight and 
revolutionize toward the embodiment of it in institutions. But 
whether that prodigious advantage with which we began the 
century should be now the occasion of pride or of some different 
emotion, might depend on other questions : "Whether, for ex- 



ORATOEN" THEODORE BACON. 449 

ample, tliat advantage has enabled us to maintain to this day 
the pre-eminence over other nations which it gave us a hundred 
years ago ; whether, as they have advanced, we have only held 
our own, or gone backward ; whether our ten talents, the mag- 
nificent capital with which we were entrusted, have been hid in 
a napkin and buried, while the one poor talent of another has 
been multiplied a hundred fold by diligence and skill. It is a 
great thing, no doubt, for a nation to govern itself, whether well 
or ill ; but it is a thing to be proud of only when its self-gov- 
ernment is capable and just. Let us look for a moment at the 
relative positions in tins respect of our own and other nations a 
hundred years ago, and now. 

A century since, the idea of parliamentary or representative 
government, primitive as that idea had been in the earliest 
Teutonic communities, and embalmed as it might still be in the 
reveries of philosophers, had no living form outside of these 
colonies, and of that fatherland from which their institutions 
were derived, and with which they were at war. In Great 
Britain itself, a sodden conservatism, refusing to adapt insti- 
tutions to changing circumstances, had suffered them to become 
distorted with inequalities ; so that the House of Commons, 
while it still stood for the English People, and was already 
beginning to feel the strength which has now made it the 
supreme power in the nation, was so befouled with rotten bor- 
oughs and pocket boroughs, that ministers easily managed it 
with places, and pensions, and money. The whole continent 
of Western Europe was subjected to great or little autocrats, 
claiming to rule by divine right, uttering by decrees their 
sovereign wills for laws, despising even the pretense of asking 
the concurrence of the governed. In France, an absolute des- 
pot, a brilliant court, a gorgeous and vicious civilization of the 
few, were superposed upon a wretched, naked, underfed peas- 
antry ; tithe-oppressed, tax-ridden ; crushed with feudal bur- 
dens upon the soil, or dragged from it to be slaughtered in 
foreign wars for matters they never heard of. Germany was 
either parcelled out, like Italy, among countless princelings, 
maintaining every one his disproportionate army, and court, and 
harem, and squeezing out taxes and blood from his people ut- 



450 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

terly without responsibility ; or was crushed beneath the iron 
despotism of the Great Frederick in the North, or of the less ca- 
pable Empire in the South. To the East, the great plains of 
Russia were an unknown darkness, where a shameless fury main- 
tained an Asiatic reign of force and terror. Here and there a 
philosophical recluse was evolving froni his books and his in- 
vention, systems of government which denied and antagonized 
the claims of divine right on which every dynasty in Europe 
was founded ; yet so remote from any practical apphcation did 
these speculations seem that the most absolute monarchs 
took pride in sharing them and fostering them. There 
were, indeed, things called " republics ;" there were the des- 
potic aristocracies of Venice and Genoa ; there were their High 
Mightinesses, the estates of the United Provinces ; there were 
the confederated cantons of Switzerland, fenced in their moun- 
tain strongholds, but without influence upon European thoughts 
or institutions. 

Over against that Europe of 1776, set the Europe of to-day. 
Nation after nation — call off their names : observe their systems 
of government, and say, when you have completed the tale, how 
many sovereigns there are who rest their title to supremacy 
upon divine right by inheritance ; how many governments there 
are whose daily continuance — how many whose very birth and 
origin, are derived avowedly from no other source than " the 
consent of the governed." There are indeed crowned heads 
to-day ; heads wearing crowns which have descended by but 
two or three degrees from the most confident assertors of " the 
right divine of kings to govern wrong ;" — right royal men and 
women— nay more, right manly men and right womanly women : 
yet of all these there is hardly one who pretends to be more than 
the mere executive of the national will, expressed through a 
representative legislature. The England which our fathers de- 
nounced as tyraut, and foe of freedom — let us not commit the 
anachronism of confounding her with the England of to-day. 
Ruled by a National Assembly chosen by a suffrage little short 
of universal, exercising final and absolute legislative authority 
with the merest advisory concurrence of an hereditary Senate ; 
its executive body little more than a standing committee of the 



ORATIOX — THEODORE BACOX. 451 

House of Commons, removable in an instant by a mere expres- 
sion of the will of the House ; and all under the nominal presi- 
dency of a quiet matron, to whom even the external cere- 
monies of her position are irksome ; with a system of local and 
municipal administration, which, however its defects, may well 
invite our admiration and study : the sturdiest proclaimer of 
the doctrines of our " Declaration " could hardly have figured 
to himself a future America which should more fully embody 
those doctrines than the realm of George the Third has come 
to embody them under his gr.mddaughtar. H we look across the 
channel, we find all Western Europe, from the Polar Sea to the 
Mediterranean, the undisputed domain of constitutional repre- 
sentative, elective government. If the name and state of King 
or Emperor are maintained, it is in effect but as a convenient 
instrument for the performance of necessary functions in the 
great public organism, and with a tacit, or even an express 
acknowledgement on the part of the crown that " the consent of 
the governed " is the true source of its own authority. Over 
the feudal France which I have but just now pictured to you, 
has swept a flood which not only destroyed institutions, but 
extirpated their immemorial foundations ; which not only 
leveled the hideous inequalities of madisevalism, but leveled 
upward the Gallic mind itself ; so that hardly less than the 
American citizen — far more than the British subject — is the 
Frenchman of to-day penetrated by the consciousness of the 
equal rights of all men before the law. His form of supreme 
administration may vary from time to time, in name, or even 
in substance ; but for fifty years it has stood upon the basis of 
the public consent, or, when it has failed so to stand, has fallen. 
The France of Richelieu — the France of that Louis XIV who 
dared to say of the State, " It is I" is the France whose latest 
king called himself no longer King of France, but King of the 
French ; whose latest Emperor claimed no right to rule but 
from a popular election by universal suffrage — boasted of being 
" Tlie Elect of seven millions" — and styled himself in the most 
solemn instruments, " By the Grace of God and the Witt of the 
People, Emperor of the French ;" and which now, dispensing 
with even the fiction of a Sovereign, administers its affairs with 



452 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

a prudence, wisdom and economy which have drawn the ad- 
miration of neighboring nations. In United Italy — in the two 
great empires which share between them Germany and Hun- 
gary — in the Scandinavian Kingdoms — and at last even in 
Spain, so long the distracted prey of hierarchy and absolutism, 
the autocracy of an hereditary monarch has given way to par- 
liamentary government and ministerial responsibility. The 
successor of Catharine the Second, by conferring spontaneously 
upon the half-civilized subjects of his vast empire not only 
personal freedom, but such local autonomy as they are capable 
of, is educating them toward a higher participation in affairs. 
And now, most marvelous testimony to the prevalence of those 
opinions upon which our own institutions are based, the world 
has seen within a month, a new Sultan, a new chief of Islam, 
announced to Europe as succeeding to the chair and the sword 
of Mahomet, "by the unanimous will of the Turkish people 1" 

Let us be quite sure, my fellow-citizens, before we boast 
onrselves immeasurably above other nations by reason of the 
excellence of our political institutions, not only that they are 
better than all others in the world, but that we have done 
something in these hundred years towards making them better ; 
or at least that we have not suffered ours to become debased 
and corrupt, while those of other nations have been growing 
better and purer. Is our law-making and our conduct of affairs 
— national, state, and local — abler and honester now than then ? 
Is tho ballot-box cleaner, and a surer reflection of the public 
mind upon public men and measures ? Or are we still in some 
small degree hampered by the tricks of politicians, so that we 
fmd-c-urselves voting into offices men whom we despise — giving 
support to measures which we abominate ? Has public opinion 
grown so in that sensitive honor " which feels a stain like a 
wound," that it compels public men to be not only above 
reproach, but above suspicion ? Or has it rather come to con- 
tent itself with weighing evidence, and balancing probabilities, 
and continuing its favor to any against whom the proofs may 
fall short of absolute conviction of felony ? Is the vast organ- 
ization of our public business contrived and controlled, as it is 
in every other civilized country, and as in every successful 



ORATION — THEODORE BACON. 453 

private business it must be, for the sole end of doing that 
business efficiently and cheaply ? Or has it become a vast 
system for the reward of party services by public moneys — a 
vast mechanism for the perpetuation of party power by sup- 
pressing the popular will — with the secondary purpose of doing 
the public work as well as may be consistent with the main 
design? Have we, through dullness or feebleness, suffered 
methods to become customary in our public service, which if, 
attempted in the British post-office or custom-house, would 
overthrow a ministry in a fortnight — if in the French, might 
bring on a revolution? My fellow-citizens, I offer you no 
answers to these questions. I only ask them ; and leavo 
unasked many others which these might suggest. But when 
we have found answers to our satisfaction, we shall know better 
how far to exalt ourselves above the other nations of the earth. 

3. A more indisputable support for national pride may be 
found, perhaps in our unquestioned and enormous multiplica- 
tion of numbers and expansion of territory. 

These have certainly been marvelous : perhaps unparalleled. 
It is a great thing that four millions of human beings, occupy- 
ing in 1776 a certain expanse of territory, should bo succeeded 
in 1876 by forty millions, occupying ten times that expanse. 
But let us be quite sure how much the increase of numbers is a 
necessary result of natural laws of propagation, working unre- 
strained in a land of amazing productiveness, unscourged by 
famine or pestilence, and burdened by but one great war 
during three generations of men ; how much to the prodigious 
importation of involuntary immigrants from Africa during the 
last century, and of voluntary colonists, induced by high rewards 
for labor and enterprise, during this ; and how much to any 
special virtue in our ancestors or ourselves. Let us be sure 
what degree and quality of glory it may be which a nation lays 
claim to for the extension of boundaries by mere mercantile 
bargain and purchase, or by strong armed conquest from its 
weaker neighbors. Let us remember, withal, that great as has 
been our growth in population and extent over this vacant con- 
tinent which offered such unlimited scope for enlargement, other 
nations have not stood still. A century ago there was a little 



454 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

sub-alpine monarchy of two or three million subjects, winch 
within these twenty years has so expanded itself by honorable 
warfare and the voluntary accession of neighboring provinces, 
that it now comprehends all the twenty-five millions of the 
Italian people. A century ago there was a little Prussian mon- 
archy of three or four million subjects, which, sparing to us 
meanwhile millions of its increasing numbers, has grown until 
it has become the vast and powerful German Empire of forty 
millions. And, while we take a just pride in the marvelous 
growth of New York and Philadelphia, and the meteoric rise of 
Chicago and St. Louis, it is well not to forget that within the 
same century London has added three millions to its numbers ; 
Manchester, Birmingham, Sheffield, Glasgow, have sprung from 
insignificance into the second rank of cities ; and that dull 
Prussian town, which, as the Great Frederick's capital, boasted 
but 100,000 inhabitants, has become a vast metropolis of 
nearly a million people, doubling its numbers in the last 
quarter of that period. If our own increase of population has 
indeed surpassed these marvelous examples — if our territorial 
expansion has in fact been larger and swifter than that of the 
Russian Empire in Europe and Asia, or of the British Empire 
in India, America and Australia, then the more are we justified 
in that manner of pride which is natural to the youth grown to 
a healthy maturity of strength and stature. 

4. Thus also, if we have not greatly surpassed the rest of 
the world in our growth in material wealth, and in our sub- 
jugation of natural forces to human use, we may fairly claim 
at least to have kept in the van of progress. Yet here, too, 
while we have great and just cause for pride, let us not- err 
by confounding the positive merits of our nation with the 
adventitious advantages which have stimulated or created its 
successes. It has been a different task, though perhaps not an 
easier one, to take from the fresh fields and virgin soil of this 
vast continent, fruitful in all that is most useful for human 
food and raiment, the wealth that has been the sure reward of 
steadfast industry— from the task of stimulating the produc- 
tive powers of lands exhausted by thousands of years of crop- 
bearing, up to that exquisite fertility that makes an English 



ORATION— THEODORE BACON. 455 

wheat -field an astonishment even to a Western New York 
farmer. It is indeed a singular fortune which ours has been 
that every decade of years has revealed beneath our feet some 
new surprise of mineral wealth ; the iron everywhere ; the an- 
thracite of Pennsylvania ; the copper of Late Superior ; the 
gold of California ; the bituminous coal of the western coal 
fields ; the petroleum which now illuminates the world ; and 
finally, the silver which has deluged and deranged the trade of 
the Orient. Let us not be slow to remember that simh natural 
advantages impose obligations, rather than justify pride in com- 
parison with those old countries where nature has spoken long 
ago her last word of discovery, and where labor and science 
can but glean in the fields already harvested. And when we 
look with wonder upon the vast public works, not disproportion- 
ate to the vastness of our territory, which the last half-century 
especially has seen constructed, let us not forget that the in- 
dustry and frugality which gathered the capital that built our 
railroad system — not all of which certainly, was American 
capital — the trained intellect of the engineers who designed and 
constructed its countless parts — are a greater honor to any 
people than 70,000 miles of track : that the patient ingenuity 
of Fitch and Fulton are more to be boasted of than the owner- 
whip of the steam navies of the world : the scientific culture 
and genius of Morse, than 200,000 miles of telegraphic wire. 

5. If I have thought it needless to enlarge upon other sub- 
jects, familiar upon such occasions, for public congratulation, 
especially will it be superfluous to remind such an audience as 
this how broad and general is the diffusion of intelligence and 
education through large portions of our country. But let us 
not be so dazzled by the sunlight which irradiates us here in 
New York, as to forget the darkness of illiteracy which over- 
whelms vast regions of our common country ; that if New 
York, and Massachusetts, and Ohio, offer to all then- children 
opportunities of learning, there exists in many states a numerous 
peasantry, both white and black, of besotted ignorance, and 
struggling but feebly, almost without aid or opportunity, toward 
some small enlightenment. Let us not overlook the fact, in our 
complacency, that while we, in these favored communities, 



456 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

content ourselves with offering education to those whom we 
leave free to become sovereign citizens in abject ignorance, other 
nations have gone beyond us in enforcing universal education ; 
in not only throwing open the feast of reason, but in going into 
the highways and hedges, and compelling them to come in. 
[ n 6. Coming to the last of the familiar sources of national 
pride which I have suggested, we may fairly say that the emo- 
tions with which a patriot looks back upon the conclusions of 
the period beginning in 1860 must be of a most varied and con- 
flicting sort. The glory of successful war must be tempered by 
shame that red-handed rebellion should ever have raised its 
head in a constitutional nation. If it was not permitted to a 
Roman general, so it is not becoming to us, to triumph over 
conquered fellow-citizens. If we rejoice, as the whole world does 
rejoice, that the conflict which for four years distracted us, end- 
ed in the restoration of four million slaves to the rights of free 
manhood, the remembrance that neither our national conscience 
nor our statesmanship had found a better way out of the bond- 
age of Egypt than through a Red Sea of blood, may well qualify 
our reasonable pride ; the question, how these millions and 
their masters are yet to be lifted up into fitness for their new 
sovereignty over themselves and over us, may well sober our 
exultation. 

If I have departed from the common usage of this occasion, 
in assuming that you know, quite as well as I do, the infinite 
causes that exist for pride, and joy, and common congratulation 
in being American citizens, I beg leave before I close to suggest 
one further reason for the emotions which are natural to all our 
hearts to-day. It has been common to us and to other nations, 
— to our friends alike and our detractors, — to speak of the insti- 
tutions under which we live, as new, experimental, and of ques- 
tionable permanency. Fellow-citizens, if we can learn nothing- 
else from the comparative view of other nations to which I have 
been hastily recommending you, this fact at least presses itself 
home upon us : that of all the nations of the earth which are 
under the light of Christian and European civilization, the in- 
stitutions of America are those which the vicissitudes of a cen- 
tury have left most unchanged ; that, tested by the history of 



ORATION THEODORE BACON. 4:57 

those hundred years, and by the experience of every such nation 
republican democracy, means permanency ,^ not revolution ; wise 
conservatism, not destruction ; and that all other institutions 
are as unstable as water in comparison. 

I believe that to-day this American "experiment" is the most 
ancient system in Christendom. Not a constitution in Europe 
but exists by grace of a revolution of far later date than the fram- 
ing of our constitution, which stands now, immortal monument 
to the wisdom of its founders, almost unchanged from its pris- 
tine shape and substance. If the stable British monarchy seems 
to you an exception, reflect upon the silent revolution which in 
that time has annulled the power of the crown, and almost sub- 
verted its influence ; remember the suppression of the Irish Par- 
liament, the removal of the Catholic disabilities which for a cen- 
tury and a half had been a foundation stone of the constitution ; 
remember the Reform Bill which prostrated the power of the 
aristocracy; the repeal of the Corn Laws, which reversed the 
economic policy of a thousand years ; look at the audacious 
legislation which within two years has destroyed even the names 
of that judicial system which is identified with English monar- 
chy-^at that which within a few weeks has dared to add a flim- 
sy glitter to the immemorial title of the sovereign herself — and 
you may well be proud of the solidity and permanence of our 
institutions compared with the swift-dissolving forms of Euro- 
pean systems. 

We know, however, that institutions, even the best of them, 
cannot long exist without change. As in physical life, there 
must be either growth or decay ; when growth has ceased, de- 
cay cannot long be postponed. How shall it be with those in- 
stitutions which a noble ancestry has bequeathed to us, and in 
which we rejoice to-day ? Let us not forget that the day is the 
beginning of a new century, as well, as the close of an old one. 
Not one of us is to see the close of the coming age, as none of 
us saw the opening of the last. And while it is given to none 
to discern the future, we know well that institutions, whether 
civil or social, cannot long continue better than the people who 
enjoy them. Be it ours, therefore, so far as lies in us, to per- 
petuate for our remote offspring the benefits which have come 




458 



OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 



down from our ancestors. Let us cultivate in ourselves — let us 
teach to our children — those virtues which alone make our free 
institutions possible or desirable. Thus, and only thus, shall 
we make this day not merely the commemoration of departed 
glories, but the portal to that Golden Age which has been the 
dream of poets and the promise of prophets, and toward which, 
as we dare to hope, the event which we now celebrate has so 
mightily impelled mankind. Our eyes shall not behold it ; but 
woe to us if we cease to hope for it and to labor towards it It 
may be hard — it is hard — for us, surrounded by the green graves 
and the desolated homes which witbin a dozen years a ghastly 
civil war has made in this religious and enlightened nation, — 
for us here, in the very presence of the tattered yet venerated 
symbols of that strife,* to believe that the day can ever shine 
upon the earth 

When the war-drnni throbs no longer, and the battle-flags are furled 
In the parliament of man, the federation of the -world : 
When the common senfe of most shall hold a fretful realm in awe, 
And the kindly earth shall slumber, lapt in universal law. 

The reign of " Peace on Earth — Good Will towards Men'' — 
the dominion of Reason and Justice over Force and Fraud — it 
may be far off, but it shall surely come. 

Down the dark future, through long generations, 
The sounds of strife grow fainter, and then cease ; 
And like a bell, in solemn, sweet vibrations, 
I hear once more the voice of Christ say," Peace?" 
.Peace ! and no longer from its 'brazen portals, 
The blast of war's great organ shakes the skies : 
But beautiful as songs of the immortals, 
The holy melodies of Love arise. 



* The worn-out regimental colors of the 33d New York Volunteers, a regiment 
which went to the war from Wayne County, were carried in the procession and set up 
in front of the speaker'6 stand. 



FOR UNION AND RECONCILIATION. 

AN ORATION BY HON. EDWARD CANTWELL, 

DELIVERED AT MOORE's CREEK, NORTH CAROLINA, JULY 4TH, 1876. 

A.S once, Simeon the Prophet, in the Temple at Jerusalem, 
with outstretched hands and streaming eyes beheld a Saviour's 
advent, and a light which should lighten the Gentiles and be 
the glorj of his own people, so, standing here on the Fourth 
day of July, at the foot of this North Carolina monument, I 
see the gate of another Temple open; I behold another light 
streaming by in the thick darkness; and as the gladsome rays 
penetrate the gloom, the very sands beneath my feet, appear 
to awaken and reverberate with celestial harmonies, which fill 
the air and float on every breeze. This is the centennial year 
of the American Republic. We are to-day celebrating the first 
centennial in the centennial year of the national existence. No 
prouder glow of patriotic exaltation inspired the last Prophet 
of Judea than now swells the breast of every North Carolinian. 

Jutting far out to sea, the eastern coasts of North Carolina 
are the first to greet the sun in his daily course of glory and of 
empire. Here, on the fourth day of July, 1584, Philip Amidas, 
and Arthur Barlowe arrived and established the first English 
colony in America, bequeathing to posterity the priceless legacy 
of Anglo-Saxon liberty, and therefore, appropriately here in 
North Carolina, begin the celebrations of the centennial anni- 
versary. Here, where the grand and unfulfilled vow of a co- 
lossal continental America for a country ; the refuge of liberty 
and the asylum of the oppressed, was first conceived and re- 
corded. Here, where the peal of its signal gun first broke the 
stillness of the morning air ; at Moore's Creek, where its first 
victory was won ; where the first North Carolina blood was 
shed, and upon the spot where the bones of John Grady of 
Duplin, her first martyred offering to liberty, He buried. 

Far from you and me, my friends, this day, be any sentiment 



460 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

which shall make us, cold or indifferent, or stand here serene } 
and unmoved. This glorious spot is our own soil. These as- 
sociations belong to us and to it and to the hour. We are 
Americans, but we are also Carolinians. We are the country- 
men of Adams, and of Hamilton, and Greene, and we are also 
the countrymen of Washington, of Caswell, of Harnett, and 
Jefferson, and we are proud of all these names. We glory in 
their achievements. We emulate their virtues ; we inherit 
and control that whole America they loved and that same great 
Republic they founded, and we propose to-day with the bless- 
ing and by the favor of Almighty God, to transmit this vast ter- 
ritory, these boundless liberties; the birfcright and inheritance 
of the whole American people; unshorn, undiminished and un- 
impaired to our remotest posterity. 

Fellow-citizens, one hundred years ago on the brow of 
this same hill there was an entrenchment occupied on the 
night of the twenty-sixth of February, A. D. 1176, by Col. 
Alexander Lillington, of the sixth regiment New Hanover mili- 
tia, with a battalion of minute men of that command. During 
the night Colonel Richard Caswell of Dobbs county arrived with 
one thousand militiamen from the counties of Craven, Duplin, 
Johnston and Wake. This constituted the American or patriot 
force. The tories, estimated at three thousand men, under 
Generals McDonald and McLeod, were encamped on the other 
side of the bridge. 

They came this way going to old Brunswick to join Lord 
Campbell, the Royal Governor of South Carolina, and the third 
brother of the Duke Argyle, who, with Sir Henry Clinton and a 
British army and the Royal Governor of North Carolina, Mar- 
tin, were coming up the Cape Fear river from Smithville, then 
called Fort Johnson, to meet them. Colonel James Moore of 
the Continental army with several hundred men, was approach- 
ing by forced marches from the Bladen side. Lillington and 
Caswell, as I have said, were here in their front.. Their situa- 
tion was critical in the extreme. They could not wait a mo- 
ment. They had to fight, and by daybreak of the morning of 
the 27th the action began. The tories led by McLeod himself, 
attempted to cross the bridge ; but during the night the planks 



ORATION EDWARD CANTWELL. 4fil 

had been removed and the heavy timbers greased. As they ap- 
proached the American rifles opened a deadly fire, and their 
ranks were decimated by volleys of broken skillets and crockery, 
discharged into them from a small field-piece stationed about 
where I stand. General McLeod fell mortally wounded, Camp- 
bell and a number of others were killed outright, and thus the 
advance was thrown into confusion. In the meanwhile Captain 
Ezekiel Slocumb of Wayne, the husband of Mary, " bloody as a 
butcher and muddy as a ditcher " forded the creek and the 
swamp, and fell on their rear. The route was complete. Colo- 
nel Moore came up after the fight. Mrs. Slocumb, disturbed by 
a dream, and riding all night to see her husband, guided by the 
sound of the guns, got here soon after the fighting began. She 
remained on the field attending the wounded. That night she 
returned to her baby, spreading everywhere she went the glori- 
ous news. That day, in these western wilds history and liberty 
found a new Thermopylae. Another name was added to those 
that wiU never die. The American rebellion organized and con- 
certed at Hilton near Wilmington, North Carolina, on the 17th 
March (Patrick's Day), 1773 between Josiah Quincy, Cor- 
nelius Harnett, and Robert Howe of Brunswick, thence forward 
became a Revolution. 

We are here then face to face as it were, with one of those 
great events which make up what is called history. We stand 
at the shrine of a martyr. These sands at our feet were once 
soaked with gore. Here Grady fell and his was the only life 
lost on the patriot side. From his expiring heart liberty drew 
its last libation. He perished let us remember in a great 
national cau*e and in no private quarrel ; for an idea and not 
for lucre or in the way of business; for the continent which gave 
him birth, as well as for North Cai'olina and "the cause of Bos- 
ton ;" for human rights and humanity's sake as swell as in ob% 
dience to his country's laws He was more than a Spartan, for 
he died for the world — for eternity and not for time. — Young 
men of Duplin and Pender, this monument on which you gaze, 
whereon his name is inscribed rises from the death-bed of a 
plain North Carolina boy. It aspires to the skies near one of 
your own obscurest creeks. There were millions of such timbers 



4(32 OCR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

as those in yon bridge unhewn in the forest then, and there are 
millions of them unhewn now. There are a thousand such 
creeks. But those planks on which Grady looked a hundred 
years ago, are still in one sense undecayed by time, still arch the 
stream from bank to bank. — The solid materials may perish ; 
the deep sluggish stream may shrink beneath its bed ; nay, the 
earth itself shall melt and pass away, or roll itself up like a 
scroll, but the name of a hero like this, i3 immortal. Another 
hundred years may elapse and the purpose of his sacrifice re- 
main unfulfilled, but that purpose will survive this monument, 
yes, the Republic itself. That " continental" army whose tri- 
umphs here began shall yet, by your aid, master the continent. 
It has marched under your fathers over mountain and valley. 
It buckles with hooks of steel the Atlantic and Pacific slopes; 
and it will continue to march on and on after we are dead, until 
the dream of the fathers shall be your reality, every American a 
continental, and the American continent with all its coasts and 
seas, and lands and islands, the snow-covered peaks of Alaska, 
in the region of perpetual winter, and the purple blooms of the 
Antilles, and the sweet scented gales of the Carribean equator, 
all, all shall become what God and nature formed them to be, 
the entire, absolute and exclusive property of a United and 
American people. 

I might ignore allusion to the civil conflict between and among 
the American people and States, which for the last ten and fif- 
teen years has so plainly checked the national prosperity. But 
the subject is one which cannot be ignored to-day. We 
must learn to speak of it as any other historical event. You are 
thinking about it now, and it is mere affectation to pretend we 
can ignore it. 

My impression is, that now it is all over ; there are very few 
of us here, who would have had that conflict result differently. 
We now see that two republics, both military, with a frontier 
line of more than three thousand miles each to defend, would 
contribute very little to the happiness or the progress of the 
American family. It would have been utterly impossible to have 
retained even the semblance of political or popular liberty. 
Slavery, wliich is necessary in the infancy of great empires, pass- 



0RA1I0N — EDWARD CANTWEIX. 463 

es away by force or consent with the growth of commerce and 
the extension of civilization. "Wherever this system of labor is 
suffered, certain political and social organizations attend it which 
are transient and indefensible. In its absence they disappear 
like the scenes in a theatre when the curtain drops betw r een the 
performers and the audience. I have insisted, and I do now in- 
sist that the right of secession was recognized in the Constitu- 
tion. We have, however, voted it away. It exists elsewhere, 
and I will now say that its exercise in any state or government 
worthy of the name is utterly improbable and impossible. 
There are not a thousand men in North Carolina who would 
take back their slaves or vote for slavery again ; and there never 
were three hundred secessionists per se. 

How amusing do the propositions of the South Carolina 
Commissioners now appear ! You remember we offered them 
free trade and the undisturbed navigation of the Mississippi. To 
our astonishment they claimed to be the owners of the river. 
They never comprehended our theories and that we had left the 
Union. They demanded the surrender of Fort Sumter and the 
raising of the flag over its blackened and moldering ruins. 
We advanced our regiments and displayed our colors in sight 
of the Federal mansion ; we occupied the district and blocka- 
ded the Potomac. We offered to pay for the public buildings. 
We proposed to assume our share of the public debt. Do you 
remember the response? Like the Roman Senate when their 
beards were pulled by Alaric, the American Congress continued 
its session; * * * * 

The great departments at Washington transacted business 
as usual, but a million of men, abandoning home, fami and 
workshop rushed to the defence of the beleaguered capital. Their 
blood enriched the soil of every southern State. Their man- 
gled corpses ridged the fields and crimsoned the streams from 
the Potomac to the Rio Grande. So generous and wealthy a 
response to the demands of the occasion ; such ardor, pervading 
all ranks of the northern population was never before seen, ex- 
cept when under Peter the Hermit, Europe precipitated herself 
upon the East and with fiery zeal, wrested the holy places from 
the grasp of the Infidel. In vain, and again in vain, the south- 



464 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

era legions, marshalled with matchless skill; inflamed with all 
the ardor of their climate ; the examples of valor ; hereditary 
bravery ; the love of fame, the smiles of beauty and the sym- 
pathies of half the world, aroused by the spectacle of such suf- 
ferings and such dauntless fortitude; dashed themselves with 
frantic valor against those solid walls ; those long, impenetrable 
lines of cold and glittering steel. 

And day by day the Federal grip became tighter, and the 
Federal lines nearer, and never went back. Through the silent 
watches of long and starless nights, the bitter cold of the 
prisons in Lake Erie, and long, cruel marches, day and night, 
along the Potomac, step by step, and hour by hour, as these 
grim veterans trudged the sloppy roads and scaled the diffi- 
cult mountains, they began to see stalking at their head, in- 
stead of Stonewall Jackson, and Polk, and Johnston, and A. 
P. Hill, who had fallen on the battle field, a spectre, a skeleton 
in armor, to which men afterwards gave shape and called the 
great collapse. The gordian knot was cut ; a problem was 
solved which had baffled statesmanship. The Union was saved 
by the very instrumentality which had imperilled its existence. 

Foiled in every effort, weak with exertion, bleeding at every 
pore, we laid down our arms and withdrew from the contest 
when our lines were no longer of sufficient strength to enclose 
the captures we made ; our means did not suffice to keep us 
and our prisoners from starvation. A more sudden and com- 
plete disintegration of a terribly effective military power was 
never before, and only once since, seen in history. 

We were like poor, betrayed and bleeding France at Sedan, 
with her cartridges filled with sawdust and her gun-carriages 
honeycombed by treachery ; but there was this difference. It 
was one which made this combat most remarkable and this 
civil war unexampled. There was no treachery here. Gene- 
ral Monk, in England, betrayed the Republic he might have 
re-created ; Wallenstein, in Germany, allowed his regiments to 
tear down the emblems of his master and replace them with 
his own. Arnold sacrificed himself, and betrayed his country; 
Maximilian was tricked to death by men of his own command; 
and Georgey, in the Hungarian struggle, preferred life and 



ORATION EDWARD CANTWELL. 405 

chains to death and liberty. At the close of this war a few of 
the baser sort took the "iron clad" oath; but no traitor's 
hand smutched the banners of the great rebellion ; no treason 
hatched discord in the Union cam}?. Had the United States 
been destroyed, they would have gone down like the frigate 
Cumberland at Hampton Roads, in fifty feet water, but in open 
fight ; the ocean pouring in over her bows and flooding the 
deadly breach, but not one single drop coming up from any 
leak ; her crew standing undismayed, beside their shotted 
guns; their flag at the mizzen; no puling murmur mingling 
with the murmurs of the green sea weed and the pitiless waves; 
no human groans breaking the defiant thunders of her last 
artillery. 

The great silent chieftain of our confederacy made but one 
speech after Appomattox. " Soldiers," said he, " we have done 
our duty ; now let us go home and be good citizens. Let the 
dead past bury its dead." There is a beautiful story in Tenny- 
son, how when Elaine felt the cold hand of death approaching, 
she called for writing materials and composed a letter to her 
Lancelot. And she made them promise her that when she 
died, they would place her on a barge and crown her with 
flowers, and they would put the same letter in her own hand, 
and the old dumb servitor of the castle should steer her dead 
body to the feet of her lover. The Confederate States Republic 
is dead, and best guided and guarded by the councils of Lee, 
is floating to her resting place upon the Appomattox. The 
dead steered by the dumb, crowned with flowers, and dressed 
in a gemmed and regal robe. Like Elaine, let her cling with 
undying grasp to the emblems of her purity. Like Elaine, 
let her carry herself, her sealed and spotless record ; let her 
wear her crown, put on her by the hands of her soldiers. 

I cannot proceed in this strain. I feel that I tread where 
the ashes are yet hot, and fire coals still glow; but them I do 
not fear. There are belligerents more terrible to me than the 
missiles of death, or an army with banners. Tongues of ser- 
pents and faces of brass, more hostile and more venemous 
than the combined Union and Confederate hosts. Veterans of 
the quill and umbrella brigade, who were not remarkable for 



466 OOR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

their prowess till the war was over, and with whom the fight- 
ing is not yet done. Confederates who were " not whipped." 
Union men whose valor was conspicuous at a distance from the 
seat of war, heroically suffering in the loss of their substitutes- 
Spectators in the amphitheater through which heroes were 
driven; particles of dust glittering with borrowed lustre above 
the chariot wheels of fiery strife, lingering in the air, reluctant 
to descend and mix again with common mold. The passions 
and prejudices of this moment will, however, one day subside. 
This dust will surely sometime be laid. Tears of grateful 
sympathy for heroic deeds shall yet deck your cheeks. "When 
at last all the survivors of those terrible combats shall be cov- 
ered by the clods for whose possession they struggled, if not 
before, there will come a day, and it may come around this 
monument, when the recollections of the past shall be invoked 
only to prevent its recurrence, and the victories on either side 
will be celebrated by the vanquished. 

Fellow-citizens, nations are subject to the same accidents and 
diseases as individuals. They traverse and complete the same 
circle. Some scarcely survive the casualties of infancy, and some 
die of old age. Never was there one which in an hundred years had 
collected so many elements of vitality as this and then suddenly 
go down. I verily believe this nation has a destiny and a his- 
tory yet to be. I think it probable it is a favored nation and a 
chosen people. As the Egyptians were once a chosen people, 
and the Hebrews after them a favored nation. I think we are 
bound to attain the maximum of our power. No human hand 
has led us hither, and no human hand can curb that destiny or 
arrest its progress. In the morning of youth the American 
Hercules has strangled the serpents which assailed his cradle ! 
As his strength matures, other and more successful labors in- 
vite his imperial glance and arms. The haughty capital of 
Rome is already rivaled by a more splendid edifice on the 
Potomac ; our population resembles that of the ancient mistress 
of the world in its admixture of all peoples, derived from every 
clime, and mingling in the same fierce current the restless 
elements of the globe. Boundless in its ambition, reckless of 
dangers and impatient of control, sustained in all its trials and 



ORATtOtt — EDWARD OANTWELL. 4G7 

wonderful progress by an omnipotent hand which has been 
more than once visibly interposed, the vast political system of 
which America is at once the centre and a nucleus, rises grandly 
up to the utmost of our hopes, moves forward with resistless 
sweep, as if it were, indeed, a part of the Celestial Economies. 
Like the Colossus at Rhodes, between whose feet once floated 
the commerce of the world, it holds a beacon in one hand and an 
arrow in the other, towers to the zenith with unflinching gaze. 
Heaven's lightnings crest her head. The live thunders sleep 
among her purple hights and sun crowned crags. Beaming 
down with a starry, mild and planetary light, the well-known 
forms of her Northern States and seas, no longer cast across 
this Southern hemisphere, dark and doubtful shadows. They 
climb up with us together and between the older constellations, 
walking among them and by them, with majestic port and pride ; 
as though the other planets only marked our footprints on the 
skies, and the universe was our throne. 



OUK KEPUBLIO. 

AN ORATION BY REV. JEREMIAH TAYLOR, D. D., 

DELIVERED AT PROVIDENCE, R. I., JULY 4tH, 1876, AT THE PLANTING 
OF A CENTENNIAL TREE IN ROGER WILLIAM'S PARK. 

Mr. President, Ladies, Gentlemen, Youth and Children : A 
German schoolmaster once said, " Whenever I enter my school- 
room, I remove my hat and bow with reverence, for there I 
meet the future dignitaries of my country." Standing as we do 
this hour upon the high places of national prosperity and join- 
ing with the forty millions of people, the inhabitants of our 
proud and grateful country in this centennial celebration, the 
future outlook is awe-inspiring. To us as to him of old, who 
beheld the bush burning, yet not consumed, there comes the 
admonition, that we are standing in the presence of the high 
and the holy. In the order of the exercises which the commit- 
tee have arranged for this day's work among us, I am impressed 
that each dej>artment illustrates well some grand historic fact, 
or enunciates some underlieing principle which has built and 
which must conserve this Republic. 

You will have observed that the celebration began by a mili- 
tary and civic procession which, after winding through some of 
the principal streets of the city, brought up at the venerable 
" meeting house," which is older than the nation, and has stood 
all these years blessing the people, and there combined with the 
services of religion and the reading of the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence and the address of eloquence. 

"What better picture of the state of things one hundred years 
ago, when stirred with eloquence as the fire of patriotism burned 
bright and aU consuming, men rushed to their altars for divine 
guidance, and then to their implements of war, to conquer or 
die. " A civic and military procession !" just that was the army 
of the Revolution springing up from field and workshop and all 
trades and professions wherever a hero might be found and the 



ORATOIN REV. JEREMIAH TAYLOR. 469 

sacred cause moved him. Next in order to-day came the grand 
Trades Procession ; symbolizing the prosperity of the country 
during a century of life and industry, and what nation under 
the whole heaven, can exhibit such a growth in a century as we 
do to-day, in all these things which constitute the strength and 
glory of a free people ? 

The third act in the scene of this pageantry is the one passing 
here, in which the children and the youth are so largely repre- 
sented ; from whose ranks are to arise the men and the women 
of the future. Yes, here we stand in the presence of the nation 
that is to be. There is a meaning, too, in the regatta appointed 
for the silent hours of incoming evening upon the quiet waters 
of the Seekonk. That old stream that has played so important 
a part in ages gone as well as now ; that yielded her bosom 
just as readily when furrowed by the canoe of the red man be- 
fore civilized lif e began, as now it endures all the wantoness and 
sport of the trained sons of Brown. For shall we not see in the 
struggles of the boat race the intensified energy and stimulated 
purpose exemplified which must constitute the warp and woof 
in the great business hfe of the future ? 

That nation only has a future among the centuries that shall 
be worthy of record, which employs ah her skill and well-directed 
enterprise to keep fully abreast of all the questions that bear 
upon human weal, and, when rightly solved, bless mankind to 
the last degree. "We want the bone, the muscle, the sinew ca- 
pable of hardly endurance, not less than the well-trained thought 
and sterling virtue for future use. The old Republic, weakened 
by effeminacy, perished. May God save us from such an un- 
honored grave ! 

It will be seen then from this run along the line of the pro- 
cession that the morning service had a more special reference 
to the past ; was largely puritanic while this of the afternoon 
and evening contemplate the future, and are mainly prophetic. 
Let us catch the inspiration that ought to move us even here 
and now. I have said this service is future in its bearings. 
But lest the muse of history should turn away in sorrow, stop 
a moment before we proceed with that idea. Let us not forget 
this place is hallowed ground. Go up into the old house which 



470 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

has crowned the brow of the hill for the century past, and which 
has just been " fixed up" for the century to come. Then walk 
down to the well of whose pure waters, the Williams family 
drank from generation to generation, and which when mixed 
with tea gave such zest to the evening' hours in the life of Betsey, 
to whose noble benefaction it is due we are here in such joyous 
mood, feeling that we are part owners of these twenty acres, if 
we hold not a foot of soil outside the Park. Then pass down 
into the sacred enclosure where the " forefathers of the hamlet 
sleep," and read the quaintly lettered story of their life and 
death. We are sorry that you cannot look upon the face of old 
Roger himself, the patron saint of all these domaius, and whose 
statue with a face as he ought to have looked when living, will 
one day appear ready to defy the storms of the open heavens as 
they may here sweep over the plain. But in the absence of that 
costly embellishment, walk across yon rustic bridge where you 
will find the apple tree and Roger Williams in it. But to our 
theme, — With these children from our public schools, and you, 
Mr. President representing the Board of Education, before me, 
how natural to say a few things in regard to education and 
government. And thus we shall see what the children must be 
and do to render the future grand — enduring. I have just read 
the story of the ' Blue-eyed Boy," who peered through the key- 
hole into the Hall of Independence, saw the venerable men 
sign the Declaration of Independence, then of his own accord 
shouted to the bellman to ring forth the joyful tidings, then 
leaping upon the back of his pony, self-appointed, rode night and 
day to the camp of General Washington, located in New York, 
and communicated to him what had been done in Congress, and 
this two days before the commander-in-chief received his dis- 
patches from the proper authorities. Like that patriotic, heroic 
boy, we want the children of to-day to herald down the coming 
ages the great facts and principles of our nation's life and glory. 
How can they do it? 

We have planted our centennial tree ; whether it survives 
and flourishes, or dies after a few months, depends upon certain 
established laws in nature. Soil, climate, sunshine and storm 
are to tell in the one direction or the other. The Republic of 



ORATION — REV. JEREMIAH TAYLOR. 471 

of the United States, which to-day wears a matronly brow and 
bears the wreath of a century, is to abide in honor and flourish 
in prosperity, or to perish from being a nation under the opera- 
tion of laws no less fixed and obvious. 

We are probably now passing through the test period of our 
existence. We have seen the sword cannot devour. The world 
knows, we know, that our arm of power is strong in defence and 
protection. The adverse elements which, during the century 
gone, have at times appeared so fierce and destructive, have only 
reduced elements of strength. Prosperity is often more danger- 
ous than adversity. When Moab could not conquer ancient 
Israel on the field of battle, she did so spread her net of entice- 
ment as to deco}' and imperil her. If we have come through 
the scourge of the sword strong, who can say that corruption 
and loss of public virtue shall not mark our ruin ? We must 
educate the young aright, if we are to conserve what we have re- 
ceived and now hold. It has been said, " the chief concern of a 
State is the education of her children.'' As a prime element in 
this education, we have need to inculcate American ideas 
of government. This may be quite easy to do with tbat 
portion of the young that are born here, and whose blood is 
Anglo Saxon ; without other ingredients, the blood and the 
birth place both have an important bearing. The Englishman, 
reared on the other side of the Atlantic, does not easily compre- 
hend the genius of our free institutions, and there noticeably 
are duller scholars still. The government here is through the 
people, and of course belongs to the people. I am a part of the 
nation, and am to my measure of ability responsible for what 
the national life is. This idea of being a factor in the Republic 
becomes one of the most potent influences for good ; one of the 
most powerful educators in the land. It was this idea that 
brought to the field of battle such vast armies to save the 
government in its last scene of danger, and rendered them so 
tractable, wise, enduring, brave, where no standing armies exist- 
ed before. Now whether a man came from China or Ireland, 
Japan or Germany, the north pole or the south pole, let him un- 
derstand at the earliest possible period, that he is one of us and 
owes allegiance to no government but what he helps to consti- 



472 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

tute. It has been said many a time, that the English debt 
makes the English government strong — because so many of the 
people are creditors. Our own government in the late war made 
the people largely its creditors for a like reason. But the bond 
of our union is deeper, broader than this, more binding, more 
sure. It is this, that not only the money is ours, but the honor 
and prosperity, and the very being of the nation belongs to the 
people. And allow me to say that our system of popular edu- 
cation is one of the best agencies that can be employed to incul- 
cate, foster and strengthen this idea. Every school in our land 
made up of a distinct nationality, on a fundamental principle of 
religion or politics, is fostering a spirit anti-Republican, and 
fraught with evil to our free institutions. 

If any people are so purblind as not to see that we offer to 
them through our public institutions better educational oppor- 
tunities than they can transplant here from the Old World, then 
we beg they will abide under their own vine and fig tree and 
leave to us and ours what we so highly prize, and propose to per- 
petuate. We shall not submit to any foreign domination, whe- 
ther it be political or ecclesiastical. 

There will naturally be connected with this American idea of 
government, as a second educational element, patriotic fervor. 
One of the weakest things in the old Ottoman power so shaken 
just now that indicates its near ruin is a lack of patriotism. 
Such an emotion as love of country is not found there. The 
Turk may fight because he is forced to, not because his home, 
family and native land are dearer to him than life. 

It was this patriotic fervor that brought our nation into being, 
and this must be an important instrumentality in its continu- 
ance. Read the closing sentence in that immortal document^ 
which one hundred years ago this very day so fired and nerved 
the people in their great struggle for liberty: "And for the 
support of this declaration, with firm reliance on the protection 
of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other onr 
lives, our fortunes and our sacred honor." Those words were 
no mere rhetorical flourish, when published. They included all 
the language could express, and infinitely more than such a de- 
claration ever contained before. 



ORATION REV. JEREMIAH TAYLOR. 473 

It may be quite easy to frame resolutions and give pledges in 
times of peace ; but the hour when the framers of the Declara- 
tion of Independence spoke so boldly and meaningly was when 
war was at the door and the hand of a most powerful nation 
was upon the throat of her feebler Colonies. 

To pledge life, property, sacred honor then was to have them 
put in immediate requisition for the imperilled cause. 

It meant, as Benjamin Franklin said to John Hancock, as he 
wrote his bold name and remarked, " We must all hang togeth- 
er. Yes, we must indeed hang together, or else, most as- J 
suredly, we shall all hang separately." That high-toned senti^ 
ment, fearlessly uttered was sustained by sacrifice and intense 
endurance. Republics are made of youth and let there arise 
generation after generation of youth, so infused, men of such 
devotion to the good of the country, and we are safe for the cen- 
turyto come, for all future years while the world standeth ; for : 

" Our country first, their glory and their pride, 
Land of their hopes, land where their fathers died, 
When in the right they'll keep her honor bright, 
Wherein the wrong they'll die to set it right." 

It was a painful feature of our American life made prominent 
before the late rebellion, that so many eminent in positions at 
home, or travelling abroad, affected to despise their birth -right, 
were ashamed of their country. They claimed to be English 
rather than Americans, when in foreign lands. And when here 
on our soil, fostered, honored, had nothing of the national life 
and spirit about them. 

In such an ignoble spirit the rebellion was matured. They 
were ever decrying their home blessings, and extolling the 
beauty and bounty of institutions far away. We are thankful 
that spirit, so vain and silly, so unnatural and obsequious, has 
been so thoroughly flogged out of the nation. I do not think 
so big a fool can be found in the entire land, in this day of 
grace, July 4, 1876, as a man who chanced to be born in our 
famed country, wishing the lines of life in the beginning had 
fallen to him in some other place. American citizenship has 
passed the period of reproach. It challenges the homage of the 
world. It is set in gems of beauty. It is royal diadem. 

In studying the character of the men who became the found- 



4T4 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

ers and framers of this Republic, we find they were distinguish- 
ed for sterling integrity, and so we must see to it that the young, 
rising up around us, are possessed of the same element of 
character, if our institutions are to be perpetuated. What we 
want to-day in our country is men who can be trusted. They 
are here, no doubt, and will appear and take their place when 
called for. Gold is good, and we want that, but men more. 
We have had a decade of sordid sentiment and base practice. 

Such a state of things is not unusual after a season of war. 
Competition was widespread after the Revolution. 

The vile mercenary spirit has invaded all departments of life 
and influences. The greed of gain, inflamed by a desire for 
personal gratification, has been too strong for the ordinary bar- 
riers of virtue and fair dealing, and what wrecks of character, 
fortune and life even have appeared as a consequence upon the 
surface of society. Men who have become insane through lust 
and gain scruple not at the use of any means which may ac- 
complish their purpose. And so we distrust one another, and 
wonder if we shall find at the Centennial Exhibition even that 
noblest work of God, " an honest man." It is thought by many 
that the evil is self-corrective, that the appalling depths of in- 
iquity which have been revealed will frighten and compel a 
hasty retreat on the part of those who have ventured on the per- 
ilous extreme. That is not the ordinary law of reform. Reek- 
ing corruption does not of itself become a scene of sweetness 
and beauty. Let us trust in no such vain hope. Rather let 
the education of the young be the source of cheerful expectation. 
Train up the children in the ways of integrity. Let it be en- 
graven upon their hearts in the deep-bedded fines of inefface- 
able conviction, that righteousness exalteth a nation, but sin is 
a reproach to any people. 

Better is the poor that walketh in his uprightness, than he 
that is perverse in his ways though he be rich. 

" 111 fares the land to baat'ning ills a prey, 
Where wealth accumulates and men decay." 

Another important lesson to be taught our youth is that 
wealth is not the end, but the means, and so our life ought to 
be one of well-appointed industry and careful husbandly, 
whether we be rich or poor. 



ORATION* BEV. JKUKM1AU TAYLOR. 



415 



Harriet Martineau, who has just died at her home in Eng- 
land, after traveling through this country and observing the 
working of our free institutions, recorded as her deliberate opin- 
ion that no calamity could befall an American youth more se- 
rious in results than to inherit a large patrimony. 

The idea has been so wide spread, that if a man has riches 
he has attained already the chief end of his being, that an over- 
indulged, useless life, is almost a sure concomitant of inherited 
wealth ; more diligence, less extravagance, should bo the watch- 
words with which to start on the new century. With the very 
fair show which the benevolent department of the country may 
make as to-day she unrolls her record of church work at home 
and abroad, her educational work, with endowed colleges and 
public libraries, her charities to the poor and the unfortunate, 
it must yet be apparent that as a people we have not learned 
how to use wealth aright. 

The great industries of the land are depressed. The hands 
of the laborer are seeking in vain for something to do, and the 
rich are becoming poor, as a consequence of the recklessness of 
habits in the modes of earning and spending in the past. The 
S-trne is true of a liberal education, as of wealth. The youth 
who, blessed with opportunities for a higher education, must 
be made to feel that they are carried through the schools, not 
to be drones in society, fancy men, but that they may contribute 
to the wisdom, integrity and every virtue in the high places of 
state and nation. 

It is sometimes said that higher education unfits some for 
business. Send a boy to college and he is good for nothing 
except in the learned professions. " If this be so, then our 
educational system needs reorganizing." The old maxim that 
knowledge is power, is true, -and broad as true. A man will 
be better fitted to fill any occupation in life for a higher edu- 
cation, if he has been educated aright. Out upon any other 
theory. Let the people everywhere be made to feel this, as the 
graduates do honor to their privileges, by meeting the just 
claim that society has upon them and the questions about graded 
schools and free colleges will fail to be discussed for want of 
an opponent. 



416 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Our country offers the highest prize for every virtue, all 
trained talent. It is base, it is mean, it is contemptible, not to be 
true, noble and good when the way to ascend is so easy ; where 
the people are so ready to crown, and honor him who deserves 
to wear a crown, and when our free institutions are so deser- 
ving of all the support and praise we can bring them. 

One word more. This has been a Christian nation during 
the century past. The great principles of divine truth have 
been wrought into the foundations and abide in the structure. 
The word of God has been our sheet anchor in the past ; it 
must be so in the future. Some one has said " Republicanism 
and freedom are but mere names for beautiful but impossible 
abstractions, except in the case of a Christainly, educated 
people. Keep this thought in the minds of the young, in all 
their course of education, and they will rise up to bless the land, 
and possess her fair and large domain. It was De Tocqueville 
who said, " He who survives the freedom and dignity of his 
country, has already lived too long." 

May none before us, or in the generations following, live thus 
long. Our Republic to the end of time. 



FROVIDENOE, PAST, PRESENT AND FUTURE. 

ORATION BY HON. SAMUEL G. ARNOLD. 

DELIVERED AT PROVIDENCE, E. I., JULY 4tH, 1876. 

To trace the causes that led to the American Revolution, to 
narrate the events of the struggle for independence, or to con- 
sider the effect which the establishment of " the great Repub- 
lic " has had upon the fortunes of the race in other lands — 
these have been the usual and appropriate themes for discourse 
upon each return of our national anniversary. And where can 
we find more exalted or more exalting subjects for reflection ? 
It is not the deed of a day, the events of a year, the changes of 
a century, that explain the condition of a nation. Else we 
might date from the 4th of July, 1776, the rise of the American 
people, and so far as we as a nation are concerned, we might 
disregard all prior history as completely as we do the years be- 
yond the flood. But this we cannot do, for the primitive 
Briton, the resistless Roman, the invading Dane, the usurping 
Saxon, the conquering Norman, have all left their separate and 
distinguishable stamp upon the England of to-day. As from 
Coedmon to Chaucer, from Spenser to Shakspeare, from Milton 
to Macaulay, we trace the progress of our language and litera- 
ture from the unintelligible Saxon to the English of our time ; 
so the development of political ideas has its great eras, chiefly 
written in blood. From the fall of Boadicea to the landing of 
Hengist, from the death of Harold to the triumph at Runny- 
mede, from the wars of the Roses to the rise of the Reforma- 
tion, from the fields of Edgehill and Worcester, through the 
restoration and expulsion of the Stuarts down to tltm days of 
George III, we may trace the steady advance of those nations 
of society and of government which culminated in the act of an 
American Congress a century ago proclaiming us a united and 
independent people. When the barons of John assembled on 
that little islet in the Thames to wrest from their reluctant king 



478 OtTtt NATIONAL JTTBILEE. 

the right of Magna Charta, there were the same spirit, and the 
same purpose that prevailed nearly six centuries after in the 
Congress at Philadelphia, and the actors were the same in blood 
and lineage. The charging cry at Dunbar, " Let God arise, 
and let His enemies be scattered," rang out a hundred and 
twenty-five years later from another Puritan camp on Bunker 
Hill. So history repeats itself in the ever-recurring conflict of 
ideas, with the difference of time, and place and people, and 
with this further difference in the result, that while in ancient 
times the principal characters in the historic drama were the 
conqueror, the conquered and the victim, these in modern days 
become the oppressor, the oppressed and the deliverer. Charles 
Stuart falls beneath Cromwell and Ireton, George III yields to 
"Washington and Greene, serfdom and slavery vanish before 
Romanoff and Lincoln. 

But we must turn from this wide field of history to one of 
narrower limits, to one so small that it seems insignificant to 
that class of minds which measures States only by tbe acre, as 
cloth by the yard ; to those men who, to be consistent, should 
consider Daniel Lambert a greater man than Napoleon Bona- 
parte, or the continent of Africa a richer possession than 
Athens in the days of Pericles. There are many just such 
men, and the materialistic tendency of our times is adding to 
their number. It is in vain to remind them that from one of 
the smallest States of antiquity arose the philosophy and the 
art that rule the world to-day, Judea should have been an em- 
pire and Bethlehem a Babylon to impress such minds with the 
grandeur of Hebrew poetry or the sublimity of Christian faith. 
But for those to whom ideas are more than acres, men greater 
than machinery, and moral worth a mightier influence than 
material wealth, there is a lesson to be learned from the sub- 
ject to which the Act of Congress and the Resolutions of the 
General Assembly limit this discourse. And since what is 
homely and familiar sometimes receives a higher appreciation 
from being recognized abroad, hear what the historian of Ameri- 
ca has said of our little Commonwealth (1), that "had the 
territory of the State corresponded to the importance and sin- 
gularity of the principles of its early existence, the world 



0BATI0N SAMUEL G. ARNOLD. 470 

would have been filled with wonder at the phenomena of its 
history." 

Hear too a less familiar voice from beyond the sea, a German 
writer of the philosophy of history. Reciting the principles 
of Roger Williams, their successful establishment in Rhode 
Island, and their subsequent triumph, he says: " They have 
given laws to one quarter of the globe, and dreaded for their 
moral influence, they stand in the background of every demo- 
cratic struggle in Europe." (2) It is of our ancestors, people 
of Providence, that these words were written, and of them and 
their descendants that I am called to speak. 

To condense two hundred and forty years of history within 
an hour is simply impossible. We can only touch upon a few 
salient points, and illustrate the progress of Providence by a very 
few striking statistics. Passing over the disputed causes which 
led to the banishment of Roger Williams from Massachusetts, 
we come to the undisputed fact that there existed, at that time, 
a close alliance between the church and the State in the colony 
whence he fled, and that he severed that unioa at once and for- 
ever in the city which he founded. Poets had dreamed and 
philosophers had fancied a state of society where men were free 
and thought was untrammelled. Sir Thomas More and Sir 
Philip Sydney had written of such things. Utopias and Arca- 
dias had their place in literature, but nowhere on the broad 
earth had these ideas assumed a practical form till the father 
of Providence, the founder of Rhode Island, transferred them 
from the field of fiction to the domain of fact, and changed them 
from an improbable fancy to a positive law. It was a trans- 
formation in politics — the science of applied philosophy — more 
complete than that by which Bacon overthrew the system of 
Aristotle. It was a revolution, the greatest that in the latter 
days had yet been seen. From out this modern Nazareth, 
whence no good thing could come, arose a light to enlighten 
the world. The " Great Apostle of Religious Freedom " here 
first truly interpreted to thosa who sat in darkness the teach- 
ings of his mighty Master. The independence of the mind had 
had its assertors, the freedom of the soul here found its cham- 
pion. We begin then at the settlement of this city, with an 



480 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

idea that was novel and startling, even amid the philosophical 
speculations of the seventeenth century, a great original i<lea, 
which was to compass a continent, " give laws to one quarter 
of the globe," and after the lapse of two centuries to become 
the universal property of the western world by being accepted 
in its completeness by that neighboring State, to whose perse- 
cutions Rhode Island owed its origin. Roger Williams was 
the incarnation of the idea of soul liberty, the Town of Provi- 
dence became its organization. This is history enough if there 
were nought else to relate. Portsmouth, Newport and War- 
wick soon followed with their antinomian settlers to carry out 
the same principle of the underived independence of the soul, 
the accountability of man to his Maker, alone in all religious 
concerns. After the union of the four original towns into one 
colony, under the Parliamentary patent of 1643, confirmed and 
continued by the Royal charter of 1663, the history of the 
town becomes so included in that of the colony, in all matters 
of general interest, that it is difficult to divide them. The 
several towns, occupied chiefly with their own narrow interests, 
present little to attract in their local administration, but spoke 
mainly through their representatives in the colonial assembly, 
upon all subjects of general importance. It is there that we 
must look for most of the fads that make history, the progress 
of society, the will of the people expressed in action. To these 
records we must often refer in sketching the growth of Provi- 
dence. 

It was in June, 1636, that Roger "Williams, with five com- 
panions (3) crossed the Seekonk to Slate Rock, where he was 
welcomed by the friendly Indians, and pursuing his way around 
the headland of Tockwotten, sailed up the Mooshassuck, then 
a broad stream, skirted by a dense forest on either shore. 

Attracted by a natural spring on the eastern bank he landed 
near what is now the cove, and began the settlement which in 
gratitude to his Supreme Deliverer he called Providence. He had 
already purchased a large tract of land from the natives which 
was at first divided with twelve others "and such as the major part 
of us shall admit into the same fellowship of vote with us," thus 
constituting thirteen original proprietors of Providence. (4). 



ORATION SAMUEL G. ARNOLD. 481 

The first division of land was made in 1638, in which fifty-four 
names appear as the owners of " home lots " extending from 
Main to Hope streets, besides which each person had a six acre 
lot assigned him in other parts of the purchase. The grauters 
could not sell their land to any but an inhabitant without con- 
sent of the town, and a penalty was imposed upon those who 
did not improve their lands. The government established by 
these primitive settlers was an anomely in history. It was a 
pure democracy, which, for the first time guarded jealously the 
rights of conscience. The inhabitants, " masters of families" in- 
corporated themselves into a town and made an order that no 
man should be molested for his conscience. The people met 
monthly in town meeting and chose a clei'k and treasurer at each 
meeting. The earliest written compact that has been preserved 
is without date but probably was adopted in 1631. It is sign- 
ed by thirteen persons (5.) "vVe have not time to draw a pic- 
ture of these primitive meetings held beneath the shade of some 
spreading tree where the fathers of Providence, discussed and 
decided the most delicate and difficult problems of practical po- 
litics, and reconciled the requirements of life with principles then 
unknown in popular legislation. The records are lost and here 
and there only a fragment has been preserved by unfriendly 
hands to give a hint of those often stormy assemblies where there 
were no precedents to guide, and only untried principles to be 
established by the dictates of common sense. Of these the case 
of Verin, reported by Winthrop, is well known wherein liberty 
of conscience and the rights of woman were both involved with 
a most delicate question of family discipline. It is curious 
enough that one form of the subject now known under the gene- 
ral name of women's rights, destined more than two centuries 
later to become a theme of popular agitation, should here be 
foreshadowed so early in Rhode Island, the source of so many 
novel ideas and the starting point of so many important move- 
ments. 

Eeligious services had no doubt been held from the earliest 
settlement, but the first organized church was formed in 1638, 
the first Baptist church in America. 

From the earliest days of the colony to the close of the recent 



4:82 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

civil strife, the war record of the State has been a brilliant one. 
As early as 1655, in the Dutch war she did more than the New 
England Confederacy, from which she had been basely excluded. 
Her exposed condition, by reason of the Indians, fostered this 
feeling in the first instance, and long habit cultivated the martial 
spirit of the people till it became a second nature. Her mara- 
time advantages favored commercial enterprise, and the two 
combined prepared her for those naval exploits which in after 
years shed so much glory on the State. The three Indian wars, 
the three wars with Holland (1652-8, 1667, 1672-4), and the two 
with France (1667, 1690), in the seventeenth century, the three 
Spanish( 1702-13, 1739-48, 1762-3), and the three French wars 
(1702-13, 1744-8, 1754-63) of the eighteenth, had trained the 
American colonies to conflict, and prepared them for the greater 
.struggle about to come. At the outbreak of the fourth inter- 
colonial war, known as the " old French war," this colony with 
less than forty thousand inhabitants and eighty-three hundred 
fighting men, sent fifteen hundred of these upon various naval 
expeditions, besides a regiment of eleven companies of infantry, 
seven hundred and fifty men under Col Christopher Harris, 
who marched to the siege of Crown Point. Thus more than 
one-quarter of the effective force of the colony was at one time, 
on sea and land, in privateers, in the royal fleets and in the camp, 
learning that stern lesson which was soon to redeem a conti- 
nent. Is it surprising then that when the ordeal came the con- 
duct of Rhode Island was prompt and decisive? It is said that 
small States are always plucky ones, and Rhode Island confirm- 
ed the historic truth. 

* ******* 

The passage of the stamp act (Feb. 27, 1765), roused the 
spirit of resistence through America to fever heat. But amid 
all the acts of Assemblies, and the resolutions of town meetings, 
none went so far or spoke so boldly the intentions of the people 
as those passed in Providence at a special town meeting 
(August 7, 1765), and adopted unanimously by the General As- 
sembly (Sept 16). They pointed directly to an absolution of 
allegiance to the British crown, unless the grievances were re- 
moved. The day before the fatal one on which the act was to 



OKATION SAMUEL G. ARNOLD. 483 

take effect, the Governors of all the Colonies, but one, took the 
oath to sustain it. Samuel Ward, " the Governor of Rhode 
Island stood alone in his patriotic refusal," says Bancroft. Nor 
was it the last as it was not the first time that Rhode Island 
stood alone in the van of progress. Non-importation argu- 
ments were everywhere made. The repeal of the odious act 
(Feb. 22, 1766) came too late, coupled as it was with a decla- 
ratory act asserting the right of Parliament " to bind the Col- 
onies in all cases." Then came a new development of patriotic 
fervor instituted by the women of Providence. Eighteen young 
ladies of leading families of the town met at the house of Dr. 
Ephraim Bowen (March 4, 1766), and from sunrise till night, 
employed the time in spining flax. These " Daughters of Lib- 
erty," as they were called, resolved to use no more British goods, 
and to be consistent they omitted tea from the evening meal. 
So rapid was the growth of the association that their next meet- 
ing was held at the Court House. The " Sons of Liberty " were 
associations formed at this time in all the Colonies to resist 
oppression, but to Providence belongs the exclusive honor of 
this union of her daughters for the same exalted purpose. This 
is the second time we have had occasion to notice that women 
has come conspicuously to the front in the annals of Providence, 
when great principles were at stake. But we claim nothing 
more for our women than the same spirit of self-denial 
and lofty devotion that the sex has everywhere shown in 
the great crises of history. The first at the cross and the first 
at the sepulchre, the spirit and the blessing of the Son of God 
have ever rested in the heart of woman. 

Side by side with the struggle for freedom grew the effort for 
a wider system of education. It was proposed to establish four 
free public schools. This was voted down by the poorer class 
of people who would be most benefitted by the movement. Still 
the measure was partially carried out, and a two story brick 
building was erected in (1768). The upper story was occupied 
by a private school, the lower, as a free school. Whipple Hall, 
which afterwards became the first district school, was at this 
time chartered as a private school in the north part of 
the town, and all the schools were placed in charge of a, 



484 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

committee of nine, of whom the Town Council formed a part 
The next year a great stimulus was given to the educational 
movement in the town. Two years had passed since Rhode 
Island College was established at Warren, and the first class oi 
seven students was about to graduate. Commencement day gave 
rise to the earliest legal holiday iu our history. A rivalry among 
the chief towns of the Colony for the permanent location oi 
what is now Brown University, resulted in its removal two years 
later (1774) to Providence. Tbis now venerable institution, 
whose foundation was a protest against sectarianism in educa- 
tion, has become the honored head of a system of public and 
private schools, which for completeness of design, for perfection 
of detail, and for thoroughness of work, may safely challenge 
comparison with any other organized educational system in the 

world. 

* * # # * * 

There are some significant facts connected with "the Centen- 
nial Exposition in Philadelphia, which serve to show the relative 
importance of this city in the industrial summary of the coun- 
try. One is that in the three principal buildings Providence 
occupies the c:ntre and most conspicious place. "We all know 
the man who commands Presidents and Emperors, and they 
obey him — who says to Don Pedro " come," and he cometh, 
and to President Grant " Do this," and he doeth it, and we 
have seen the mighty engine that from the centre of Machinery 
Hall moves fourteen acres of the world's most cunning in- 
dustry. The Corliss engine proudly sustains the supremacy of 
Providence amid the marvels of both hemispheres. Facing 
the central area of the main exhibition building, the Gorham 
Manufacturing Company have their splendid show of silver 
ware around the most superb specimens of the craftsman's art 
that has ever adorned any Exposition in modern times. Under 
the central dome of Agricultural Hall the Rumford Chemical 
Works present an elaborate and attractive display of their varied 
and important products, arresting the eye as a prominent object 
among the exhibits of all the world. And when we visit the Wo- 
men's Pavilion we shall see that of all the rich embroidery there 
displayed none surpasses that shown by the Providence Employ- 



ORATION SAMUEL G. ARNOLD. 485 

merit Society, and shall learn that little Rhode Island ranks as 
the fifth State in the amount of its contributions to the funds 
of this department, being surpassed only by New York, Penn- 
sylvania, Ohio and Massachusetts. A city which occupies 
these positions in the greatest Exposition of the century has 
no cause to shun comparison between its past and its present. 
****** 

But by far the greatest event of its bearing upon the pros- 
perity of Providence was the introduction of water which, after 
being four times defeated by popular vote, was finally adopted 
in 1869. The work commenced the next year, and the water 
was first introduced from the Pawtuxet river in November, 1871. 
The question, whether Providence was to become a metropolis 
of trade and manufactures or to continue as a secondary city, 
was thus settled in favor of progress. The stimulus given in 
the right direction was immediate and immense. The overflow 
of population soon required the city limits to be extended, and 
the annexation of the Ninth and Tenth Wards caused an in- 
crease of forty-six per cent, from the census of 1870 to that of 
1875, a showing which no other city in the country can equal. 

That the city of Providence has its future in its own hands 
is apparent. "With the vast wealth and accumulated industries 
of a century at its disposal ; with the result which this latest 
measures <of improvement has produced as an encouragement ; 
and with the experience of other lees favored seaports as a 
guide, there would seem to be the ability and the inducement to 
take the one remaining step necessary to secure the supremacy 
which nature indicates for the head waters of Narragansett 
bay. While our northern and western railroad connections are 
already very large and are rapidly reaching their requisite ex- 
tension there remains only the improvement of the harbor and 
adjacent waters of the bay, which can be made at comparatively 
small expense, to make Providence the commercial emporium 
of New England. There is no mere fancy in this idea. It is an 
absolute fact, attested by the history of Glasgow, and fore- 
shadowed by the opinions of those who have thought long and 
carefully upon the subject. It is a simple question of engi- 
neering and of enterprise, and it will be accomplished. When 



486 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Providence bad twelve thousand inhabitants, as it bad within 
the life time of many of ns who do not yet count ourselves as 
old, bad some seer foretold that the centennial of the nation 
would see the quiet town transformed into the growing city 
starting upon its second hundred thousand of population, it 
would have seemed a far more startling statement than this 
with which we now close the Centennial Address — that the 
child is already born who will see more than half a million of 
people within our city, which will then be the commercial me- 
tropolis of New England. 



A KESUME OF AMERICAN HISTORY. 

AN ORATION BY L. A. GOBRIGHT, ESQ., 

DELIVERED AT WASHINGTON (ford's OPERA HOUSE), JULY 4tH, 1876. 

Ladies and Gentlemen, Fellow-Members of the Oldest 
Inhabitants' Association, and Soldiers of the "War of 1812 : — 
Time was with some of us when on the Fourth of July revolu- 
tionary soldiers adorned the platform, and were objects of 
curiosity, but they have all passed away, leaving their works as 
our inheritance. At first they fought for their rights as British 
subjects, but these being denied, the Continental Congress in 
1776 meditated a separation from British rule, and on the 7th 
of June, Richard Henry Lee, of Virginia, introduced the follow- 
ing resolution : 

Resolved that these united Colonies are, and of right onght to he, free and inde- 
pendent States; that they aie ahsulved from all allegiance to the British crown, and 
that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain ia, and onght 
to be, totally dissolved. 

Before the final discussion a committee, consisting of Thomas 
Jefferson, John Adams, Benjamin Franklin, Roger Sherman, 
and Robert C. Livingston, was appointed to draft a Declaration 
of Independence. The Declaration having been reported to 
Congress by the committee, the resolution itself was taken 
up and debated on the first day of July, and again on the 2d, 
on which latter day it was agreed to and adopted. Having 
thus passed the main resolution, Congress proceeded to con- 
sider the reported draft of the Declaration. It was discussed 
on the second, third, and fourth days of the month, and on the 
last of those days received the final approbation and sanction 
of Congress. It was ordered at the same time that copies be 
sent to the several States, and that it be proclaimed at the head 
of the army. The Declaration thus published did not bear the 
names of the members, for as yet it had not been signed by 
them. It was authenticated, like other papers of the Congress, 
by the signatures of the President and the Secretary. On the 



488 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

19th of July, as appears by the Secret Journal, Congress re- 
solved that the Declaration passed on the 4th be fairly engrossed 
on parchment, with the title and style of "The Unanimous 
Declaration of the Thirteen United States of America," and the 
same, when engrossed, be signed by every member of Congress; 
and -the 2d day of August following, the Declaration being 
engrossed and compared with the original, was signed by the 
members. 

Absent members afterwards signed as they came in, and it 
bears the names of some who were not chosen members of 
Congress until after the 4th of July. 

"We must be unanimous," said Hincock ; "there must be 
no pulling different ways ; we must all hang together." "Yes." 
replied Franklin, "we must indeed all hang together, or most 
«y assuredly we shall all hang separately." 

On the 9th of July Washington caused the Declaration to bo 
read at the head of each brigade of the army. " The General 
hopes," he said in his orders, " that this important event will 
serve as a fresh incentive to every officer and soldier to act 
with fidelity, as knowing that now the peace and safety of the 
country depend, under God, solely on the success of our arms, 
and that he is now in the service of a State possessed of suffi- 
cient power to reward his merit and advance him to the highest 
honors of a free country." 

The people of the City of New York not only indulged them- 
selves in the usual demonstrations of joy by the ringing of bells 
and the like, but also concluded that the leaden statue of his 
Majesty, George the Third, in the Bowling Green, might now 
be turned to good account. They therefore pulled down the 
statue, and the lead was run into bullets for the good cause. 

Everywhere throughout the country the Declaration was 
hailed with joy. Processions were formed, bells were rung, 
cannon fired, orations delivered, and in every practicable way the 
popular approbation was manifested. 

The causes which led to the Revolutionary War are sufficient- 
ly set forth in the Declaration of Independence, which has just 
been read in your hearing, and therefore need no elaboration. 
The result of the conflict is stated in the treaty of peace — 1183 — 



OEATION L. A. GOBRIGHT. 481) 

in which his Majesty the King of Great Britain acknowledges 
the American Colonies as free, sovereign, and independent 
States ; " treats with them as such for himself, his heirs, and 
successors, and relinquishes all claims to the Government, pro- 
prietary and territorial rights of the same, and any part thereof." 
After coming through the night of the Revolution, 

Our ancestors, with joy, beheld " the rays of freedom pour 
O'er every nation, race, arid clime — on every sea anr" shore ; 
Snch glories as the patriarch viewed, when, 'mid the darkest skies, 
He saw, above a mined world, the bow of promise rise." 

"With a view of maintaining the Declaration of Independence a 
resolution was passed making an appropriation to the committee 
of safety for a supply of gun flints for the troops at New York, 
and the secret committee were instructed to " order the £un 
flints belonging to the continent and then at Rhode Island, to 
the commanding general at New York." An agent was also 
sent to Orange county, New York, for a supply of flint-stone, 
and a board was empowered to " employ such number of men 
as they should think necessary to manufacture flints for the 
continent." 

Additional measures were also taken to arm the militia, pro- 
vide flying camps, and to procure lead, to build ships, make 
powder, to manufacture cannon and small arms, and provide 
generally for vigorous warfare. 

Colonel Washington had been appointed Commander-in-chief 
of the American forces in June, 1775, by the unanimous voice 
of the colonies. In accepting the trust, he declared, " with the 
utmost sincerity, I do not think myself equal to the command 
with which I am honored." His modesty, perhaps, gentlemen, 
would not suit the fashion of the present time. 

It is necessary merely to allude to the present appliances of 
war in contrast with the means then accessible, namely, the 
monster cannon ; the giant powder, with shot and shell in pro- 
portion to the explosive power ; the mailed ship, propelled by 
steam ; the perfected rifle, with its percussion caps and longer 
range than the musket, and no anxiety about a plentiful supply 
of flints, such as exercised our patriotic sires. 

Ever since 1776 the subject of the Declaration has afforded 



490 



OUU NATIONAL JUBILEE. 



fourth of July orators au opportunity to glorify the Eagle as 
the symbol of America. 

You have often been told of the victory of this same Ameri- 
can eagle over the British Lion, in a kind of allegorical de- 
scription. But this was more poetic than historic. In the 
common-sense moments of the youngest as well as of the " old- 
est inhabitants," we should not think the contest between two 
such forces exactly equal ! 

Tobias Smollett, the English novelist, reconciles the Lion 
with the Eagle thus : 

"Thy spirit. Independence, let me share, 

Lord of the Lion heart and Eagle eye, 
Thy steps I follow with nay bosom bare, 

Nor heed the storm that howls along the eky.'' 

The eagle, no matter what may be said of his predatory 
habits, and of the scriptural expression that " where the carcass 
is there will the eagles be gathered together," triumphs. He 
is seen on the buttons of our warriors, on our coin, and the 
seal of the United States, the last-named designed by a com- 
mittee consisting of Benjamin Franklin, John Adams and 
Thomas Jefferson. Wilson, the American ornithologist, says of 
the bird : " Formed by nature for braving the severest cold, 
feeding equally on the produce of the sea and of the land, 
possessing powers of flight capable of outstripping even the 
tempests themselves, unawed by anything but man, and from 
the etheral heights from which he soars, looking abroad at one 
glance on an immeasurable expanse of forests, fields, lakes, and 
ocean deep below him, he appears indifferent to the localities 
of change of seasons, as in a few minutes he can pass from 
summer to winter, from the lower to the higher regions of the 
atmosphere, and thence descend at will to the arctic, the abode 
of eternal cold, or to the torrid regions of the earth." 

Gentlemen, our Government has such veneration for the proud 
bird that it has three fine live specimens in our own Franklin 
Square, in a cage for public admiration ! The eagle is one of 
our institutions, and therefore has our enforced respect. 

The eagle, however, was not the only symbol recognized by 
our ancestors. The rattlesnake was displayed on many of their 



ADDRESS — L. A. GOBRIGHT. 491 

banners. One of the arrangements was a rattlesnake divided in 
thirteen parts, with the initial letters of the colonies to each, and 
the motto " Unite or Die !" And another, the rattlesnake, in 
the act of striking, the motto being, " Don't tread on me !" The 
rattles were thirteen in number. This device, stranger than that 
of " Excelsior,"was a favorite with the colonists, and was meant 
to signify retaliation for the wrong upon America : 

The snake was ready -with his rattle, 
To warning give of coining battle. 

Something may here be said about the American flag, the one 
that has taken the place of all others. It was not till the 1 4th 
of June, 1777, that the design of the flag was formally adopted 
by the Continental Congress, although it is said a similar flag 
flew over the headquarters at Cambridge more than a year before 
that time. The act of Congress thus described it : " The flag of 
the thirteen United States shall be thirteen stripes, alternate red 
and white, the Union thirteen stars, white, in a blue field, rep- 
resenting a new constellation." 

This continued to be the flag until two new States were ad- 
mitted into the Union, namely, Vermont, in March, 1791, and 
Kentucky, in June, 1792, when Congress passed an act, June 
13, 1794, making an alteration in the flag, which provided that 
from and after the first day of May, 1795, the flag of the United 
States shall be fiiteen stripes, with fifteen stars. There seems 
to have been no further agitation of the subject until 181G, when 
a bill was introduced making another alteration in the flag. 
The number of stripes were restored to thirteen, the stars to 
correspond to the number of States in the Union, a new star to 
be added to the flag whenever a new State should be admitted, 
the star to be placed there on the 4th day of July thereafter. 

Among the reasons for altering the flag was that "There was 
a prospect at no distant period that the number of States would 
be considerably multiplied, and this rendered it highly inexpe- 
dient to increase the number of stripes on each flag, which must 
be limited in size." As a consequence of this arrangement we 
have now thirty-seven stars, with room for many more on the 
azure field; and additional brightness will be added this cen- 



492 OUB NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

tennial year to our constellation by the silver beams of Col- 
orado. 

This flag has for a century " braved the battle and the breeze ;" 
A blazing light upon the land, a beacon on seas. 

It would be a mistake to suppose that our forefathers con- 
quered Great Britain. The question might be put in this way : 
Great Britain did not conquer them. She found, after experi- 
ence, that, having to transport, at enormous expense, large 
bodies of troops across the ocean— three thousand miles, in sail- 
ing vessels — was very unprofitable, as they did not accomplish the 
desired object, namely, the subjugation of the Colonists, who, of 
determined spirit, and having resolved to be free and independ- 
ent of British rule, were not to be frightened from their patriotic 
purpose by coats of red, typical of the fire that boomed from 
their unfriendly cannon, and, besides, Holland having joined the 
belligerents against England, and England having been humili- 
ated by the crowning battle of the contest — the surrender of 
Cornwallis — she departed from our soil, leaving the Colonists 
in full possession. 

It was not until 1789 that the General or Federal Govern- 
ment went into full operation. At that time the population 
was supposed to be three millions, but in the eighty-seven years 
past it has, from various causes, increased to forty millions. 
The American eagle, which could fly over our original country 
without stopping to drink or to rest, finds that he cannot now 
without frequent stoppages on his course for refreshments, 
owing to enlarged limits, accomplish the distance from ocean 
to ocean without complaining, in his own natural way, of a 
weary wing. 

A hundred years ago the people never thought of railroads, 
the steam engine and the electric telegraph — those great revolu- 
tionizes in everything that pertains to individual and national 
comfort— or if they did, there is no record of the fact. The 
traveling was on horseback, in gigs, and wagons, and carryalls, 
and sailing vessels, and row boats. And think : the time be- 
tween England and America was from six weeks to two months, 
the duration of the voyage depending upon the state of the 
weather and the temper of the sea. Steam now propels the 



ORATION — L. A. GOBRIGHT. 403 

magnificent steamer across the Atlantic in eight or nine days — 
3,000 miles — and the same distance is traveled from Washing- 
ton to the Pacific Ocean, by railroad, in seven days. An experi- 
mental trip recently showed that the journey from New York to 
San Francisco could be made in eighty-three hours and thirty- 
four minutes, or at the rate of one thousand miles a day ! And, 
instead of waiting for weeks or months to receive intelligence 
from remote parts of our own country, and the world at large, 
the path of the subtle fluid, electricity, affords an instantaneous 
means of intercommunication, and thus annihilates space ! 

If our Revolutionary sires could reappear on earth, and see 
these wondrous things, together with the results of inventive 
genius, and progression in the arts and sciences, their expres- 
sions of surprise would be equal to, if they did not exceed, 
those of the hero of the Kaatskill mountains — but in a more 
agreeable sense — when he awoke from his long slumber, to be 
startled by the actual changes which meanwhile had taken place ! 
"We ourselves can scarcely realize the growth of the infant Re- 
public, from its cradle in Independence Hall to the present time, 
when it stands forth in the pride of manhood with unconquer- 
able strength ! 

It may here be appropriately mentioned that the first voyage 
across the Atlantic in a steam vessel was performed by the steam- 
ship Savannah in 1819. She was built in New York the year 
previous. On nearing Liverpool she was discerned from a 
lookout, and, as nothing of that kind had been seen there before, 
supposing a ship was on fire, one of the King's cruisers was 
sent to her relief. 

An item of the past will not. be uninteresting in connection 
with the subject of locomotion. The Pennsylvania Gazette, of 
Philadelphia, January 3, 1116, had the "latest dates," namely : 
ten days from Boston, and five days from New York. The 
" freshest " foreign dates from London were sixty days old, and 
these contained " an humble address of the House of Commons 
to the King," in which they say : 

" No other use has been made of the moderation and for- 
bearance of your Majesty and your.Parliament but to strengthen 
the preparations of this desperate conspiracy, and that the 



494 OlUt NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

rebellious war now levied is become more general, and mani- 
festly carried on for tlie purpose of establishing an independent 
empire ; and we hope and trust that we shall, by the blessing 
of God, put such strength and force into your Majesty's hands 
as may soon defeat and suppress this rebellion, and enable your 
Majesty to accomplish your gracious wish of restoring order 
tranquility, and happiness through all the parts of your united 
empire." 

The King graciously returned his fervent thanks for this 
loyal address, saying : " I promise myself the most happy con- 
sequences from the dutiful and affectionate assurances of the 
support of my faithful Commons on this great and important 
conjuncture, and I have a firm confidence that by the blessing 
of God and the justice of the cause, and by the assistance of 
my Parliament, I shall be enabled to suppress this dangerous 
rebellion, and to attain the most desirable end of restoring my 
subjects in America to the free and happy condition and to the 
peace and prosperity which they enjoyed in then constitutional 
dependence before the breaking out of these unhappy dis- 
orders." 

The King and Commons not being as successful as they an- 
ticipated, his Majesty sent to this country Admiral Viscount 
Howe and General William Howe, general of his Majesty's forces, 
as a commissioner in the interests of peace, and it is some- 
what singular that their flag-ship bore the name of our national 
symbol the Eagle — off the coast of the Province of Massachu- 
setts. He declared the purpose of the King " to deliver all his 
subjects from the calamities of war and other oppressions they 
now undergo, and restore the colonies to peace ;" and he was 
authorized by the King to " grant his free and general pardon 
to all those who in the tumult and disorders of the times may 
have deviated from their first allegiance, and who are willing by 
a speedy return to their duty to reap the benefits of the royal 
favor." 

But the Colonists or "conspirators" were not desirous of 
thus " reaping." The seed they had themselves sown was to 
mature to a more precious harvest. They turned their plough- 
shares into swords, and their pruning-hooks into spears, with 
the result of a fruitage beneficial to all mankind ! 



ORATION — L. A. GOBB1GHT. 405 

John Quincy Adams, in his oration delivered July 4, 1831, 
said "Frederick the First of Brunswick constituted himself 
King of Prussia, by putting a crown upon his own head. 
Napoleon Bonaparte invested his brows with the crown of 
Lombardy, and declared himself King of Italy. The Declara- 
tion of Independence was the crown with which the people of 
united America, rising in gigantic stature as one man, encircled 
their brows, and there it remains. There, long as this globe 
shall be inhabited by human beings, tnay it remain a crown of 
imperishable glory. 

My friends, it is a solemn truth that there is not now on earth 
an intelligent person who lived on the Fourth of July, 1776. 
We read of the heroic struggles of the Continental army ; their 
want of discipline and poverty, and the scarcity of money with 
which to purchase the needed supplies, and of the many sacri- 
fices they made in the cause to which the best men that ever 
lived consecrated their lives and fortunes, and all else they held 
dear of ease and comfort ; men who set the world an example 
in the straggle for freedom, which they eventually established. 
Their Constitution and the laws they passed to put it into op- 
eration attest their wisdom and the knowledge of the needs of 
the people in their new condition. 

My friends, in what condition will our country be one hun- 
dred years henc: — the fourth of July, 197G ? Will the same 
form of government we now have be preserved ? Will it afford 
the same protection of personal freedom, property and human 
rights ? Will the proud banner still wave over a united and 
prosperous people '{ These are questions to be answered by 
succeeding generations. If they are true to the teachings and 
examples of our Revolutionary sires the Republic will endure. 
If not, then the bright, and we might say this haughty Republic 
will pass into history with that of Rome, and for similar causes. 
There can be no republic that is not founded on the virtue, in- 
telligence, and assent of the people. Enforced government be- 
longs to tyranny. 

We have additional cause of rejoicing in the fact, that, al- 
though national encounters have cursed the world ever since 
nations have had an existence, there is now no war between any 



496 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

nations. This is an era of peace. Even the oldest nations, in- 
cluding China and Japan, and others of the East, come with 
those of Europe to the happy centennial greeting. They bring 
with them, to exhibit near our own, their useful and ornamen- 
tal products ; all compatible with peace, and calculated to 
stimulate a beneficial rivalry. 

Not far from where we are assembled lie the ashes of one 
whose character the entire world admires. 

His name is seldom heard, excepting when it is uttered to 
designate the city which he founded. There was a time when it 
was more publicly honored than it is now ; but still his memory 
is cherished by many patriotic hearts. Whatever may be the 
mutations in public affairs — whosoever may, for the time being, 
occupy the larger share of public attention, either as a warrior 
or as a statesman, the name of Washington, with its patriotic 
associations, will always be precious to the lover of liberty. But, 
alas ! his teachings are too often disregarded, and we have not 
yet completed the monument to his memory. We may, however, 
without a dissenting voice, on this Centennial day, the first that 
we have seen, and the last that we shall ever see, recall a few 
words from his Farewell Address, although it was written eighty 
years ago. He said : 

" The unity of government which constitutes us one people is 
also now dear to you. It is justly so, for it is a main pillar in 
the edifice of your real independence ; the support of your tran- 
quillity at home, and your peace abroad ; of your safety, of your 
prosperity , N of that very liberty which you so highly prize." 

And the Father of his Country further advised " his fiiends 
and fellow-citizens " to " indignantly frown upon the first dawn- 
ing of every attempt to alienate any portion of our country from , 
the rest, or to enfeeble the sacred ties which now link together 
the various parts." 

He counseled : " Towards the preservation of your Govern- 
ment and the permanency of your present happy State, it is re- 
quisite not only that you steadily discountenance irregular op- 
position to its acknowledged authority, but also that you resist 
with care the spirit of innovation upon its principles, however 
specious the pretext." 



ORATION — L. A. GOBRIGHT. 497 

And again : " It is substantially true that virtue or morality 
is a necessary spring of popular government. The rule indeed 
extends with more or less force to every species of free govern" 
ment. Who that is a sincere Mend to it can look with indif- 
ference upon attempts to shake the foundation of the fabric. 
Promote then, as an object of primary importance, institutions 
for the general diffusion of knowledge. In proportion as the 
structure of a government gives force to publie opinion, it is 
essential that public opinion should be enlightened." 

My friends, let us cherish the heavenly principle of " Peace 
on earth, good will to man," and by word and example en- 
deavor to cultivate in the hearts of those who are taking our 
places in the active scenes of life a love for law and liberty — a 
respect for the institutions of others, while preferring our own — 
and the enforcement of the duty of elevating the best men only 
to office, those who will see that the Republic suffers no detri- 
ment, for the acts of the public agent should be the reflex of the 
will of the constituency. A few should not plunder the many. 
To permit such practices is to sanction them. And let all wrong- 
doers be punished either by public opinion or by the criminal 
court, and public agents remember that the Government is for 
the people and not for themselves. 

It was said aforetime, " Power is always stealing from the 
many to the" few ; " therefore if we would continue free we must 
guard against every encroachment on our liberties. And then 
there can be no doubt the Republic will endure, strengthened 
in population with the corresponding prosperity, presenting an 
example to the world at large for emulation, and conferring the 
richest blessings on the entire human race ! 



ADDRESS, 

BY HON. DANIEL ROBERTS, 

DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BURLLNOTON, VT., 
JULY 4th, 1876. 

Fellow-Citizens : — The citizens of Burlington have invited to 
this festal gathering the civil authorities of the several towns of 
the county, with their civic societies and all their people, and 
they have deputed me, in their behalf, to bid you all welcome to 
a participation. in the appointed doings and appropriate enjoy- 
ments of the day. 

One hundred years of national life ! a hundred years of lib- 
erty, guarded by constitution and law ; a cycle completed this 
day which includes in it the first establishment of the American 
Union and its later vindication : the first proclamation of uni- 
versal human freedom and equality, and their later crystaliza- 
tion in an amended constitution, and the consummation in his- 
toric fact of the self-evident truths of the Great Declar- 
atin. 

As in the first Continental Congress, on the motion of Benja- 
min Franklin, prayer was offered to Almighty God for guidance 
and strength for the great work then in hand, so now, having 
entered into the labors of the fathers, it is befitting the occasion 
that we lift up our eyes to the hills from whence cometh our help 
— to the good God and Father of us all — and that we offer de- 
vout praises and adoration to Him whose kind hand has led us 
for a hundred years as a nation, and our people always, and has 
brought us to this day in assured j>eace, confirmed unity and 
established liberty — for, of a truth, hitherto hath the Lord 
helped us. 



THE CHARACTER OF THE EARLY SETTLERS OF 
VERMONT-ITS INFLUENCE UPON POSTERITY. 

AN ORATION BY HON. LUCIUS E. CHITTENDEN. 

DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION AT BURLINGTON, VT., 
JULY 4th, 1876. 

Mr. President and Citizens of Chittenden County : — An 
apology seems out of place on such an occasion as the present. 
But I must excuse myself for the disappointment I am about to 
cause you, of which I gave your committee timely warning. 
From their vote and from the published accounts of the pre- 
parations for the centennial celebrations throughout the coun- 
try you had the right to expect from me an address which 
should present the principal events of the last hundred years 
in your county in their proper historical succession, in accord- 
ance with the suggestion of the President of the United States 
and of the proprieties of the occasion. Such an address I can- 
not give you for several reasons. I shall mention only one. 
Had I been equal to the labor of gathering the facts — of col- 
lating and compressing them within the brief hour here al- 
lowed me — I should then have threshed a harvest which has 
been gathered by others ; I should have opened no new field 
of enquiry, contributed no new fact to the sum of historical 
knowledge. For be it known that among the other treasures 
which you have preserved are all the materials for a history of 
your county, and every township it comprises. So thoroughly 
has the field been gleaned, that no sheaf has been left for me. 
That ct ntennial orator who shall stand here after another hun- 
dred years will find ready to his hand every fact, circumstance 
and particular in the history of Chittenden county for the first 
hundred years which I could have gathered had my time and 
industry both been unlimited. He will then, I hope, find in 
every township a public library, such as you have in this city. 
Iu each of them there will be new editions of the histories of 



500 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Williams, Allen, Hoskins, Thompson, the two Halls, and that 
wonderful repository of fact and incident, the " Vermont His- 
torical Gazetteer." After he has exhausted these he will never 
think of hunting in the obscurity of the past for any poor 
address of mine. 

I think earnest students of the early history of Vermont will 
find one inquiry difficult to answer. It is this : How was it 
possible that a few scattered settlers, deficient in resources and 
poor in purse, could accomplish the results which they did ac- 
complish '? In 1774 they numbered scarcely more than 1,500 
families. They were dispersed from the Winooski and the 
Great Bend of the Connecticut to the Massachusetts line. 
They had no means of assessing taxes, no organization which 
was not purely voluntary. They had already maintained them- 
selves against the Power of New York through a struggle of 
nearly ten years. They sprang to arms at the summons of re- 
volution. They captured Ticonderago, raised a regiment which 
made the name of Green Mountain Boys historical, joined in 
the invasion of Canada, saved the remnant's of Wooster's army, 
and barred their long frontier against invasion. Relieved for 
a space from arms, they came into convention to form a con- 
stitution. The news of Burgoyne's invasion and St. Clair's 
retreat, arrested their deliberations. Again they hurried to the 
frontier, fought the battle of Bennington, raised another regi- 
ment and paid its expenses out of Tory property. Again they 
kept an invading army idle for many months which almost out- 
numbered their population, and sent them back to the place 
from whence they came. Once more we find them in conven- 
tion at Windsor, finishing the first constitution, the most demo- 
cratic, free and just ever yet adopted in any American State. 
They adopted it without even the form of a vote, and having 
launched the independent State of Vermont in defiance of New 
York, New Hampshire, King George, and I might say of all the 
evil powers of earth and air, they entered upon that singular 
struggle with Congress and the other States, which did not end 
until 1791, when all opposition worn out or overcome, Vermont 
took her seat at the national board in a Federal Union. 

Such is a mere outline of their work. Its details are supplied 



ORATION LUCIUS E. CHITTENDEN. GO I 

by history. "Where upon all the earth shall we find any like 
number of men with the ability to plan, the courage to execute, 
such an enterprise as they carried out ? Surely it will be to our 
advantage if we can find out the causes of their success. In 
those causes we may find the secrets of some of our failures. I 
propose to examine some of these causes, to set before you a few 
of the prominent traits in the character of our ancestors, 
through which they secured the inheritance now enjoyed by a 
fortunate posterity. The subject upon which I shall attempt 
to address you will be " The Conditions of Success in Civil and 
Military Life in Vermont One Hundred Years Ago." 

Looking back now to the work of our fathers, the first great 
fact that meets the eye is the ability and skill with which they 
appropriated individual resources to the common good. They 
never wasted a useful man. They knew how to utilize each 
other. They improved not only every natural quality or acquir- 
ed ability, but even personal defects and peculiarities for the 
cause of the people. In this respect they were far wiser than 
their posterity, and herein, beyond doubt, lay one of the great 
secrets of their power. They understood the value of union, of 
united action everywhere, in the family, the community, the 
township and the state. "What union did for them we shall see. 
A pyramid of granite block with no cementing material topples 
down. You may build a tower of willows and so bind them to- 
gether that an earthquake will not overthrow it. Unite a peo- 
ple perfectly and no blow struck from without can injure them, 
no external enemy overcome them. The power of Spain has 
not sufficed to suppress an insurrection in a single province of 
Cuba. Unite the people of the island as Vermonters were 
united and they might defy the armies and navies of the 
world. 

We cannot organize success because of individual peculiari- 
ties. A. and B. are both strong men, but they are so unlike that 
they repel each other. Bring them in contact and they will 
fight. Look now at the men whose characters < >ur fathers could 
assimilate, whose diversities they could make an element of 
strength. Let us name a few of the leaders, who resembled 
each other in one respect only — they were all patriots. 



502 



OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 



There was Etlian Allen, a man of giant frame and iron mus- 
cle, in manner rough, but in soul as gentle as a woman, impa- 
tient of restraint, intolerant of opposition, his mind undiscip- 
lined and in constant revolt against all control, human or 
Divine. 

Ira Allen, his brother, a born diplomatist, smooth and pol- 
ished in address, equally skilled in concealing his own thoughts 
and in discovering those of others. 

Seth Warner, the soldier, open and generous, into whose 
soul jealousy or vice of any kind could find no by way to enter, 
the Bayard of Vermont, without fear and without reproach. 

Their First Governor, a plain, simple farmer, but shrewd and 
far-sighted, whom men could take into their confidence in spite 
of themselves, whose rule of life it was to make the best of 
every body, because, to use a rather Irish expression, which he 
applied daily, " he knew they always turned out better than he 
thought they would." 

The two Fays, Jonas and Joseph, masters of the caucus, so 
systematic that no convention could be held regular that had 
not a Fay for its secretary. 

The Robinsons, negotiators, pioneers in all missions to other 
States and powers. Nathanial and Daniel Chipman, educated 
trained lawyers, slightly aristocratic, faithful servants of the 
church by law established. Stephen R. Bradley, a democrat 
by nature, the best political writer of his time. Ebenezer 
Allen, who could not write a sentence correctly, but who could 
and did write the first American Emancipation proclamation. 
Remember Baker, who always doubted which he hated most, a 
Yorker, a Tory, or an Indian. Cochran, a hunter and guide, a 
philosopher and a patriot — and I might name a score of others, 
but these will serve to make leaders enough for all our political 
parties, for as many sects as ever opposed the Pope— so unlike 
each other in all things, that you would not suppose they could 
have sprung from the same race. Had they been like ourselves, 
they would have all been leaders, but each would have led a dif- 
ferent party. 

We have to go deeper to find their points of unity. They 
all came from that iron-souled race of thinkers, who, early in 



ORATION LUCIUS E. CHITTENDEN. 503 

17th century, burst the fetters of the Church and State, and 
shook the centres of monarchy to their bases with the proposi- 
tion, that the powers of government were derived from the 
people, should be employed for the benefit of the people, that 
any system of religion which taught the contrary was no true 
system or religion. For this faith they might be and were 
broken on the wheel, but from it they would not turn. They 
were Republicans in religion and in politics. Emigrating from 
Europe into the free air of this Western World, these prin- 
ciples became a part of themselves, their descendants carried 
them into Western Connecticut and Massachusetts, and from 
thence into this wilderness, where they confronted all the dan- 
gers and deprivations of a new settlement. They were patriots 
by birth, by growth and by education. However much they 
might differ in other affairs, they were all agreed that they would 
not tolerate any invasion of their rights of person or property. 
That was tyranny, and tyranny was to be resisted to the death. 
They were taught by their fathers — their lives were perpetual 
illustrations of the necessity of united action. In their case 
division was destruction — union, perfect union of opinion, re- 
sources, characters and powers alone could preserve them. 

I now ask your attention to some of the consequences to the 
person and the community of this Common unity of action and 
opinion, amoug those men, who differed so widely among them- 
selves. I need not remind you that in their time the telegraph, 
the railway and the steamboat had not been invented. There 
was scarcely a highway upon the Grants. Men went from place 
to place on foot or on horseback, following Indian trails or lines 
marked trees. You will scarcely credit the assertion that under 
such circumstances the full effective strength of the new settle- 
ment could be mustered at any given point with nearly as much 
celerity as now. The statement is almost incredible, but you 
will hear my proofs before you reject it. I take them from his- 
tory. It was on the 4th of May, 1775, when Allen summoned 
his first men to march upon Ticonderoga. He lost a full day 
waiting for boats on the shore of the lake, and even then cap- 
tured the fort in the morning twylight of May 10th. There 
was then a block house near the north end of the bridge at 



501 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Winooski. It was called Fort Frederic, garrisoned by men en- 
gaged in surveying or clearing the intervales above. They were 
under the command of Remember Baker. In some way, Allen's 
summons reached Baker in time to enable him to call in his 
men, equip them, embark them on a flat-boat, sail down the 
river to its mouth, row or sail up the lake, capture a boat filled 
with escaping British soldiers, on the way to Canada, and to 
reach Crown Point in time to take part in the capture of that 
fort, before noon of the 1 Oth of May. Could you do much better 
now? 

I find the fact also recorded that in the winter of 1776, an 
express from Albany brought the news to Bennington that Sir 
John Johnson, with five huudred Tories and a body of Indians, 
was marching upon Tyron County, then at the eve of insurrec- 
tion. The Yorkers — the people who had kidnapped Baker, and 
declared Allen an outlaw — implored the Green Mountain boys 
to help them. Did they arswer, you are the men who, with 
strong hand, without right, for more than years have been 
striving to rob us of our homes ? No ! no ! "Within twelve hours 
after the news reached the Grants, that more than ninety Green 
Mountain boys, armed, equipped and provisioned, were on the 
march, and every one of these Vermonters was furnished by a 
single town. They joined Schuyler, marched to Johnstown, and 
received the surrender of the invading force. 

David Wooster, a captain in the French war, had a New York 
grant of lands in the town of Addison, in 1761, the Vermonters 
who had expelled Col. Reid from the meadows of the Otter 
Creek, found Wooster serving writs on the settlers of the lauds 
he claimed. They tied him and his sheriff to a tree, threatened 
them with the Beech seal, and released them only when they 
had withdrawn then* writs, and promised to go and sin no 
more. 

We next hear of Wooster in midwinter of 1776. Montgomery 
has fallen. Wooster is in command of a defeated and dispirited 
army below Montreal, and the smallpox h epidemic among the 
frozen, starved and wounded patriots, who have traversed the 
wilds of Maine only to be defeated before Quebec. They are 
surrounded by an enemy twice their number. He is writing to 



OIUTOIN LUCIUS E. CHITTENDEN. 505 

Col. Warner. "Oar prospect is dubious,'' he says. "I have 
sent to General Schuyler, Gen. Washington and to Congress * 
* * but you know how long it will be before we can have re- 
lief from them. You and the valiant Green Mountain Corps 
are in our neighborhood. * * * You all have arms and ever 
stand ready to lend a helping hand to your brother in distress." 
Had I time I would read the whole of this touching letter. He 
implores Warner to send him help, " Let the men set out at 
once * * * * by tens, twenties, thirties or fifties. It will 
have a good effect on the Canadians. 1 am confident I shall see 
you here with your' men in a very short time." 

This letter was written near Montreal on the 6th of January, 
and on the 22nd, only 16 days later, Schuyler withdrew his re- 
quest upou Washington for reinforcements, because, as he said, 
Warner had been so successful in sending men to Wooster's 
aid. Again the courage and celerity of the Vermonters saved 
the army. They formed Wooster's rear guard, standing like a 
wall between him and his pursuers, and fought all the way from 
the St. Lawrence to the Islands of Lake Champlain. Nor did 
they relax their watchful care until June, when the last weary, 
wounded soldier of that army was safely sheltered within the 
walls of Ticonderoga. 

I could give many other illustrations of their promptness in 
marching to protect a friend or destroy an enemy. Let us now 
note their conduct in a difficult emergency. 

The embryo State never passed through a darker period than 
that between the advance of Burgoyne and the battle of Benn- 
ington. The retreat of St. Clair left the whole western frontier 
unprotected. Burgoyne scattered his proclamations, setting 
forth his own strength and offering protection to all who would 
abandon the patriot cause. All the provisions brought to his 
camp would be paid for in gold. The defection was frightful. 
Every wavering man accepted his offers. Even one member of 
the council, to his eternal disgrace be it said, deserted. The peo- 
ple were poor. They had no money or credit. Alarm and con- 
fusion everywhere prevailed. A volunteer force must be raised, 
armed, fed and clothed, or the contest in this quarter was ended. 
How could it be done ? 



50 () OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

But there was a little band of men known as the Council 
of Safety which was neither discouraged nor dismayed. They 
took account of their resources as coolly as a few weeks before 
they had discussed the provisions of the new constitution. The 
prime necessity of the moment was to raise an adequate force of 
volunteers, and put a stop to these desertions. Both objects 
were accomplished by a single resolution, conceived, adopted, 
and its execution provided for in a single session. 

Ira Allen, then a statesman 26 years old, was its author. It 
provided for a committee of sequestration, with power to con- 
fiscate the estates of the Tories and out of the proceeds raise 
and pay the voluteers. It stopped desertions instantly. Vol- 
unteers promptly came forward. This resolution was the first 
and a most fatal blow struck at the army of Burgoyne. 

Let me now call your attention to an illustration of the prac- 
tical common sense which appears to have controlled the actions 
of our ancestors. I refer you to their first convention to frame 
a constitution. It convened at Windsor in July, 1777. Half 
its members came direct from their regiments to the conven- 
tion. Burgoyne was approaching with an army which twice 
outnumbered all the men on the Grants able to bear arms. 
Congress had just declared that the idea of forming a new State 
here was in substance derogatory to that body and a violation 
of the rights of New York. 

Cool and undismayed the delegates met in convention. Ira 
Allen has written that " the business being new and of great 
consequeiice required serious deliberation." No doubt of that. 
A draft of the constitution was presented, by wkoni prepared 
we do not know. They examined it section by section. In the 
midst of the debate an express arrived with news of St. Clair's 
retreat before Burgoyne. The families of the President and 
many of. the members were exposed to the hireling and the 
savages in his train. Their first impulse was to adjourn 
and hasten to the defence of their homes. Just then a sudden 
July storm arose, which their venerable chaplain declared was 
an indication of the Almighty's will that the constitution should 
be adopted then and there, and while awaiting its cessation, in 
the very conflict of the element, the darkened hall illuminated 



ORATION — LUCIUS E. CHITTENDEN. 507 

by the flashes of the lightning, they formed a State. The con- 
stifcution was read through and virtually adopted. A vote ap- 
pointing the Committee of Safety followed, an adjournment to 
December, the storm passed over, and within two hours of the 
arrival of the express the members were on their way to defend 
their families and their firesides. 

They came together again in December, stirring events had 
happened meantime in which they had been actors. The bat- 
tles of Bennington and Hubbardton had been fought ; Bur- 
goyne had surrendered, Ticonderoga had been retaken, the 
frontier had been cleared of the invador, and many of the vol- 
unteers had returned to their homes. The convention finished 
its work without delay. They adopted a preamble and ratified 
the constitution. They decided that it was not expedient to 
submit their work to a popular vote. They named the 12 th of 
March for their first election, and sent Ira Allen to Connecticut 
to have the constitution printed, 

"We must not assume that wide differences of opinion did not 
exist among the members of that body in respect of the govern- 
ment they were about establishing. Wide and honest differen- 
ces did exist — which probably then could not have been satis- 
factorily adjusted. I make this reference for the single purpose 
of showing the wisdom which these plain men displayed in deal- 
ing with these questions. To-day such questions would be 
wrangled over in convention, fiercely debated by the press, and 
after months of acrimonious discussion decided to the satisfac- 
tion not of the people, but of a party. 

Our fathers recognized the necessity of some kind of a gov- 
ernment, established it, and postponed their differences until it 
had been submitted to the test of experience. Instead of mak- 
ing a permanent Constitution, to be changed only by the weary 
processes adopted in other States, they provided«for a conven- 
tion to recommend changes every seven years. This provision 
satisfied everybody. It originated your council of censors, and 
furnished what experience has shown to be the very best me- 
thod of amending a constitution. 

There was a wise purpose in the omission to submit the ques- 
tion to a popular vote. Vermont was surrounded by watchful 



508 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

enemies. Congress had just denounced the project of a separate 
State. New York was using every artifice to divide and dis- 
tract the people. New Hampshire was intent on the same pur- 
pose. It was doubtful whether the popular vote would then 
have given a majority for any constitution. The convention es- 
caped the danger by not submitting it, and their constituents 
ratified their decision. 

I hold this original constitution, as printed in Hartford, in my 
hand. In view of the circumstances in which it was made it is 
a remarkable document. I might well have made it, as I first 
intended, the exclusive subject of my address to-day, for I de- 
clare without reservation that it is in my judgement the wisest, 
the most liberal, the best State paper to be found in American 
constitutional history. I can only use it now as an illustration 
of the wisdom, the patriotism and the unselfish motives which 
controlled the men who gave it to their posterity. 

Let me cite an example of the promptness with which these 
men in a critical emergency took into their confidence a stranger 
to their councils, and the very leader of the opposition, when 
his peculiar ability was required to extricate the State from 
danger. 

The negotiations with the British commander, in Canada, 
which so long protected the state from invasion and kept an 
army idle, were known to but few of the leaders of the Vermont" 
ers. Had they been made public these leaders would have lost 
the public confidence and the British must have overrun the 
State. 

The object of Haldimand, the British commander, was to 
make a separate treaty with the Vermonters, by which the State 
should be placed under British protection. Ira Allen and Dr. 
Fay, acting for the Vermonters, insisted that time was necessary 
to bring the leaders to their views. With this pretext the}* 
kept Haldimand quiet through the spring and summer of 1781 5 
but the Legislature was to meet in October, and Haldimand in- 
sisted that the matter should then be closed and made public. 
He would wait no longer. Early in the autumn he sent a pow- 
erful army, under St. Leger, up the lake to Crown Point, to 
threaten the Grants, encourage the Tories, ready to issue his 



OR ATIOX — LUCIUS E. CHITTENDEN. 509 

proclamation at the proper moment. An accident had well 
nigh made everything public and thrown the State into St. 
Leger's hands. 

Gen. Enos, with Cols. Fletcher and Walbridge, had a small 
force on the west shore of the lake. Some scouts from the two 
armies met, fired on each other, and one of the Vermont ser- 
geants was killed. To the surprise of the Vermont officers) 
who were not in the secret, the next day St. Leger sent the 
sergeant's body, with his clothing and arms, into their lines, 
with a note of apology for his death. Enos despatched an 
express, with St. Leger's note, and his own comments upon 
it, to the Governor, at Charlestown, where the Legislature was 
in session. The messenger, on his way, and at Charlestown, 
made the fact public that the British General had apologized 
for killing Sergeant Tupper. A crowd gathered, suspicions of 
treachery were rife, and the excitement was intense. They 
demanded that the dispatches brought by the messenger should 
be immediately made public. The situation was most critical. 
Had the dispatch been read, the negotiations must have been 
made public, and Vermont would have been lost without 
substantial resistance. 

The prudent Governor quietly announced to the excited 
people that the dispatches were very important, that he 
should have to peruse them in private, and would make them 
public next morning, after consulting the board of war. This 
satisfied the impatient multitude, and they dispersed. 

He called the board of war together. They were in the secret. 
They acted without hesitation. Then, as now, there were two 
parties. There was one man, and probablj only one man, who 
could revise hose dispatches, lay them before the people, and 
send them peacefully away. That man was the leader of the 
opposition to Chittenden and the Aliens. He was a young and 
able lawyer, who had recently come into the State, who sus- 
pected, but was not in the secret of the negotiations with the 
British. You might suppose they hesitated, lest he might ex- 
pose their plans, and advance his own party by their ruin. Not 
for one moment. They sent for him, laid open the whole 
matter, and asked his aid. And he was true as steel — swept 



510 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

aside every other consideration, and applied himself to the work 
in hand as earnestly as if he had been responsible for all the 
dealing with the emeny. St. Legar's note, the dispatches from 
Enos and his Colonels, were placed in his hands, and he retired' 
The next morning these papers were read to the Legislalure 
and the people. There was not a word in them relating to the 
armistice or the negotiations with Haldiman — not a word upon 
suspicion could be founded. The excitement ceased. Legisla- 
ture and people went about their ordinary business. The fall 
of Cornwallis soon followed. St. Leger and his army went back 
to the place whence they came, and once more the infant State 
was out of danger. It is due to history to say that the young 
lawyer to whom I refer was Nathaniel Chipman. 

To my mind there is a nobility in this high confidence be- 
tween opposing party leaders in the integrity of each other 
which takes them out of the ranks of party and raises them into 
the purer atmosphere of patriotism. 

I would also refer to some of the principles declared in this first 
constitution— its declaration 90 years in advance of the nation 
that " government is for the people, without partiality or preju- 
dice against any particular sect, class or denomination of men 
whatever" — that "all men are equally free — that no person shall 
be held as a slave- — that no man's religious opinions can be 
controlled by law- — that affirms the right to bear arms — the 
right to trial by jury— th- right to hold papers and property 
sacred from the grasp of the bailiff or the ferret eyes of the 
detective— that it is the duty of every man to have some pro- 
fession, trade or farm — that public services deserves compen- 
sation, but to where the profit s of an office lead many to apply 
for it they ought to be lessened by the Legislature" — principles 
for which we have substituted the pernicious doctrines that 
public office is official spoil, and that there is no personal right 
too sacred to be invaded to overthrow a political enemy. 

But I must not weary your patience, and my case does not 
require further proof. I have established, fairly I think, that 
thorough freedom of thought and independence of judgment, 
perfect unity of action in public affairs, promptness and celerity 
of action, justice and kindness in dealing with honest errors of 



ORATION — LUCIUS E. CHITTENDEN. 511 

a public servant, were qualities for which our ancestors were 
distinguished, and by the use of which they attained success. 

And they possessed another quality of which I ought to give 
you some illustrations. You may call it judicious selection, 
the skill which always selects the right man for a place, the 
choice of the fittest — or by whatever name you please. 

This power of selection is one of the highest which men can 
exercise — the test of human ability — for no man from the Great 
Alexander to our own great soldier, who did not possess it, was 
ever successful. We have a school in physics which declares 
that the economy of creation is based upon this principle of 
selection, and it has many able advocates, I have not time to cite 
cases. I will refer you to history for them. 

I will sum up the argument on this point in a single proposi- 
tion. Whenever they had a public duty to perform, they always 
selected their best man for that place, and when they had placed 
him there instead of engaging in petty warfare upon him, they 
sustained him by their counsel and advice — yes, by their fortunes 
and their blood. This support of their leaders is one of the 
noblest traits in their characters. Not more firmly and patient- 
ly until the going down of the sun did Aaron and Hur stay up 
the hands of Moses when they were heavy, than did these men 
sustain their leaders always, and especially in the dark and des- 
pondent hours, when they were most ready to sink under the 
weight of their burdens. 

I have thus given you an imperfect sketch of the leading char- 
acteristics of the men who founded Yermont, and whose memo- 
ries we delight to honor to- day. Imperfect as it is, it will sug- 
gest the question to you. Who are the men in our time who 
have shown themselves to be true heirs of these ancestral glo- 
ries ? Who that lives to-day is to be honored at our next cen- 
tennial as we honor these men ? Has human nature degenerat- 
ed '? Is the race of great men dead ? No ! I answer a thousand 
times no ! 

The fault is with ourselves. We have departed from the ways 
of our fathers. We no longer act upon the principles through 
which they achieved success. 

No one will deny that as a nation we have departed from the 



512 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

faith and practice of the founders of Vermont. Not Vermonters 
alone— perhaps they have offended less in this respect than 
others — but all the people of all the States. The existing greed 
for office — that corrupting theory which defines office to be the 
sjDoil of the defeated, and the property of the successful politi- 
cian, the vindictive spirit of party which discovers no virtue in 
a political opponent, and which strikes by foul means as readily 
as by fair — which seems to have driven out of our political life 
all the characteristic traits of the statesman and the gentleman, 
and to have substituted in their places the vocabulary of the fish 
market and the morals of the gambling house ! which fills the 
party press with abusive attacks upon private character, and 
causes newspapers to reek with scandals so foul that we fear to 
introduce them into our dwellings — these are practices of recent 
invention for which we shall search in vain the history of the old- 
en times. That they are hurtful, that in these days the greatest 
danger to our Republic and its perpetuity we know right well. 
If I can say one word in this respect for reformation, if I can 
make one Vermonter adopt and practice henceforth the ancient 
and the better way, my time will not be wholly lost. 

That one of the necessary results of this diseased public opin- 
ion is to drive from public life a great number of our best men 
who ought to be there, you well know. It is a sacrifice at best 
for a citizen to take office, but if when he leaves it he is to be 
subject to inquisition his patriotism must be higher than the av- 
erage if it will induce him to enter public life at al!. Many are 
lead in consequence to despair of the Republic, for that is indeed 
a. gloomy condition of public affairs when bad men seek and good 
men will not accept public employment. "We should neither 
shun these fears nor entertain these anticipations. I do not be- 
lieve that the public men of either party have suddenly become 
bad and unprincipled. It is not true that we have entered 
upon a new era of jobbery, selfishness and fraud, which is to be 
corrected by the spasmodic virtue of any sect or condition of 
men. I speak plainly. I denounce without circumlocution or 
apology the slogan of corruption, peculation and dishonesty 
which screams out of every morning issue of many of our 
newspapers. It is a wrong to the name of every American 



OEATION — LUCIUS E. CHITTENDEN. 513 

citizen. Must a foreigner like Goldwin Smith remind us that 
our character and institutions have just been submitted to 
the tremendous strain of civil war, and that war always is fol- 
lowed by great disturbances in morals and business ? In our 
case, without preparation, we went from a condition of peace 
into the very whirl of rebellion. We suppressed it after years 
of fighting, and after we absorbed our mighty armies again into 
the pursuits of peace. We have done this with less of change, 
with less of danger to popular integrity than any other nation 
ever experienced. In proof of this statement allow me to refer 
to one or two periods and events in the history of the Anglo- 
Saxon race. I will take first that period of English history 
which followed the death of Queen Anne and the accession of 
that very fine and exemplary King, the first George, during 
which happened those memorable events, the expulsion of 
James II. and the exclusion of his heirs from the succession. In 
this period occurred those awful massacres, proscriptions and 
executions in England and Ireland, which brought the country 
into the very horrors of revolution. The animosity of spirit 
which then characterized the two great parties was never 
equalled before or since. Whig and Tory became personal as 
well as political enemies. Each made the other odius by at- 
tacks which touched the lowest depths of scurrility. A Tory 
paper was quite moderate Avhich said " to desire the Whigs to 
forbear lying would be unreasonable. It is their nature and 
they could not subsist without it." The Whigs replied with 
equal courtesy. The most abusive pamphlets, ribald and dis- 
gusting, yes the foulest caricatures were openly sold in the pub- 
lic streets. "The Art of Billingsgate," and " Bobberies of a 
Jacobite Ministry," were popular publications. Paralysis of 
business, universal distrust, the Mug House riots, High church 
mobs, stock jobbing frauds, the Mississippi schemes, the South 
sea bubble ; the debasement of art and literature were followed 
by the impeachment of an entire ministry at the head of which 
were Bolingbroke, nnd Ormond. The excesses of the common 
people against the dissenters led them to cut off the ears and 
tail of an ox, to tie squibs and crackers in their places, and 
having lighted these they drove the tortured animal into a dis- 
senting church and congregation. 



514 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

AIJ these excesses brought in the reign of libel and of attacks 
on personal character similar to that we daily read, for England 
had then traveled for a long distance the road upon which we 
have just entered. There were then as T trust there are now a 
few men of both parties who were bold enough to denounce the 
extremists and to charge them with much of the responsibility 
for the existing corruption. Among them was Addison. Listen 
to his utterances on this subject in England in the year 1712 : 

" Would a government set an everlasting mark of their dis- 
pleasure upon one of those infamous writers who makes his 
court to them by tearing to pieces the reputation of a compet- 
itor, we should quickly see an end put to this race of vermin 
that are a scandal to government and a reproach to human 
nature. Such a proceeding would make a minister shine in 
history, and would fill all mankind with a just abhorrence of 
persons who should treat him unworthily, and employ against 
him those arms which he scorned to make use of against his 
enemies. 

"Every one who has in him either the sentiments of a Christian 
or a gentleman, cannot but be highly offended at this wicked and 
ungenerous practice, which is so much in use among us at pres- 
ent that it is become a kind of national crime, and distinguishes 
us from all the governments that lie about us. Scurrility now 
passes for wit — and he who can call names in the greatest vari- 
ety of phrases, is looked upon to have the shrewdest pen. By 
this means the honor of families is ruined ; the highest posts 
are rendered cheap and vile in the sight of the people, and the 
noblest virtues and most exalted parts exposed to the contempt 
of the vicious and the ignorant. Should a foreigner who knows 
nothing of our private factions, or one who is to act his part in 
the world when our animosities are forgot, should any such a one 
form to himself a notion of the greatest men of all sides in the 
British nation, who are now living, from the characters which 
are given them in some or other of these abominable writings, 
which are daily published among us, what a nation of monsters 
we should appear." 

Is it not remarkable that when in this country there is for the 
first time in our history an excited and angry fear of corruption 



ORATION — LUCIUS E. CHITTEXDEK 515 

in public life, the press and people of England should gloat over 
what they profess to consider our downfall, and hold up to view 
their own purity ? Whatever others may say, England is the 
last country to attack any other on the ground of the immoral- 
ity of its government or the corruptions of its public men. For 
every instance of a corrupt American, in which corruption was 
proven, or even feared, a score of worse cases in England may 
be produced. Do they charge Americans with the use of money 
in legislation, they may find a precedent in their own Parlia- 
ment, when the Speaker distributed the money and bought 
Parliamentary votes enough to carry through a treaty. But it 
is undignified to pursue the parallel. I unite with the whole 
American people in denouncing corruption under all its many 
forms ; I regret that we must admit its existence among us, 
but with them I demand that, like any other crime, it shall be 
proven before I admit that it has infected the body of the peo- 
ple, and when they cry of party, and party injustice, shall be 
heard no more, and all the wrongs committed and passionate 
conclusions reached in time of excitement are corrected, im- 
partial history will say, that during all the strain to which we 
have been subjected in the past decade, the heart of the Amer- 
ican people was never infected but always pure, that the few 
exceptions existing only prove the rule, and that the discipline 
which we now go through will bring us out finally as the first 
great nation who passed through a mighty war, to conquest 
and victory, and then absorbed her military strength into her- 
self, leaving no permanent influence upon the public virtue or 
upon ancient institutions to which posterity cannot point with 
honor and with pride. 

For our future is full of hope. Has not England herself re- 
covered ? She was once the country of pocket purchasable 
boroughs, the very sinks of electoral corruption ; the capital of 
her aristocracy was invested in sinecure offices of honor and of 
profit. Once she carried measures through wholesale bribery, 
and once as I have shown you, private character and personal 
integrity counted for as little as it apparently does with us. 
But now there is not a country on earth more free from general 
scandal ; none in which private character, whether of peer or 



OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

peasant, statesman or private citizen, is more efficiently pro- 
tected. It is shielded not only by law, but by the higher law, 
of public opinion. True, occasionally low and scurrilous news- 
papers spring up, and achieves an ephemeral success by intro- 
ducing there the press warfare which we ought to condemn. 
A noted case of this sort arose out of the Tichborne trial, and 
there are others more recent ; but they are soon crushed be- 
neath the force of law and public opinion like noxous vermin. 

But this admonishes me to bring these desultory remarks to 
a close. I have fallen short of the demands of the occasion 
and of your just expectations. It is a great occasion. Never 
since the landing on Plymouth Bock has the Nation kept such 
a holiday. It is a great occasion for Vermont. Throughout 
twenty-six years our fathers toiled and labored, suffered and 
and bled for the right to enter the Union of the States. To-day 
no member has a place of higher honor. This day is welcomed 
throughout the nation as the greatest thanksgiving ever cele- 
brated. In it we cross the line of centuries and commence 
another period of our national existence. Looking backward or 
forward we discover abundant reason why we should greet this 
morning with a roar of rejoicing cannon, and flash upon the 
darkness of to-night the blaze of universal illumination. It is 
a high privilege to stand before the people to-day gathered in 
mighty audiences in a thousand places, to recall to their minds 
the virtues and the glories of their ancestors. It is a grand 
experience, surrounded by the morning glories of that century, 
standing before its open gate, to see spanning the entire hori- 
zon the bow of future promise to posterity and to humanity. 
Ours is a glorious heritage indeed. To learn how our fathers 
gained it for us is also to leam how we and our children can 
preserve it. It was not gained without a mighty sacrifice, it 
cannot be preserved without watchful care. I have sought in 
an imperfect way to set before you the principles by the use of 
which our fathers gained the liberties which we enjoy, by which 
they became great and their children prosperous. Let the song 
of thanksgiving ascend from a choir of forty million voices — 
let ifes theme be a country stretching from Ocean to Ocean, 
from the dark forests of the far Northwest, to the balmy airs 



ORATION LUCIUS E. CHITTENDEN. 517 

of tropical everglades, with its mines of gold and silver and all 
metals, its fertility in all that sustains human life and promotes 
human comfort — inhabited by an intelligent and progressive 
people with room enough for thrice their number. Let it giye 
thanks for the free constitutions under which all the people live 
— for their wise legislatures, for their love of education, their 
general industry, frugality, temperance and enterprise. Let it 
be said in their praise that they welcome to the protection of 
their flag the oppressed of every land, that no slave lives be- 
neath its folds, that no taint of color, no accident of birth ex- 
cludes any man from the highest privileges which that flag pro- 
tects, and let it proclaim the mighty fact that the government 
under which we live has now b9en tested by the heats of a 
century, by foreign war and domestic rebellion, by all the acci- 
dents and all the events which have wrecked other governments, 
while it has only demonstrated the strength of ours, because 
of that still greater and more momentous fact that the strength 
of our government consists in the honor, the patriotism, and the 
integrity of the people, and if these virtues can be preserved, 
our nation will endure as long as earth endures, until the fount- 
ains of the great deep are broken up and the elements themselves 
dissolve in fervent heat. A great thanksgiving of the people 
of a hemisphere forty millions in number is an occasion of 
mighty significance, when like ours it demands of all the world 
the recognition of the principles of popular government based 
upon virtue of the people. It reduces the service of political 
economy to a single axiom which a child can comprehend ; 
Preserve the virtue of the people ! Preserve the virtue of the 
people I ! Away with all political creeds and litanies, which re- 
quires philosophers to comprehend them and put them into 
practice. As stated in our first constitution, our government is 
for the common benefit, protection and security of the people, 
and it is built and for one century has been sustained upon the 
virtue and integrity of the people. 

Simple as this creed appears to be it imposes a duty upon 
every individual citizen. Because there is not now in all the 
nation, people more intelligent than that which I am address- 
ing, so there is no place where this duty is so easily performed 
as among such a people. 



618 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Will you my friends undertake its performance, here in this 
Queen City and prosperous county, with all your natural and 
acquired advantages, your communities in which intelligence is 
so widely diffused. You have here, as you always should have, 
two political parties, each honest and earnest in its convictions. 
Each is represented by an enterprising newspaper. Will you 
gentlemen who conduct these newspapers, take care that no at- 
tack upon the character of an opposing candidate, no gibe or 
slur, no libel or coarse insinuation finds a place in your col- 
umns ? Will you give to your opponent credit for the same 
good intentions which you claim for yourselves? Tou leaders 
of these parties, will you be at the same time courteous gentle- 
men, more ready to speak kindly than coarsely of the other 
side ? Will you set before your humblest followers an example 
of purit}' in speech and dignity of deportment, not alone in 
caucus and convention, but in your daily life and conversation ? 
Will you citizens one and all remember that except within the 
limited range of party elections, there should be no divisions 
among you ? The word itself should be excluded from use. 
In your city and town goveruments, those little democracies in 
which great men have said our strength consisted, in your edu- 
cational systems, your internal improvements, your plans for 
the reformation of the young, the support of the poor, and the 
punishment of crime — in the control of your public libraries — 
in all your plans for the advancement of the people in litera- 
ture and the arts — in your charitable and benevolent institu- 
tions, will you come back to the ways of your fathers and prac- 
tice that unity for the results of which we give thanks this day ? 
In these public matters will you employ the same discretion 
which you use in your private affairs. Will you select the fit- 
test man for every station, sustain him by your advice and en- 
courage him by your example, with no regard to his political 
opinions or party connections '? How simple all these questions 
seem and yet how important they are to the happiness of a 
people. Imagine a people laboiiug in perfect union for the 
general good — a community from which all heart-burnings, ir- 
ritations, local or private jealousies, are banished, where the 
good qualities of each individual are recognized and made use 



ORATION — LUCIUS E. CHITTENDEN. 51 9 

of for the common good. What a factor would such a state 
become in the future of our country. She would send repre- 
sentatives to both branches of Congress, whose public and pri- 
vate lives would honor their State and themselves, and she 
would keep them there so long as they gave her faithful service, 
and represented a state and not a party. Her judges would 
keep the records of her judiciary pure while the ermine of other 
States is draggled in the mire of political organization. And 
so in every station, high or low, there would be an honest, 
faithful public servant laboring earnestly in the service of his 
employers and cordially sustained by the grateful praises of the 
people. 

Personal indejDendence of opinion, perfect unity of the people, 
celerity of action in public affairs careful selection of the fittest 
man for every office, having in view the quahties which that 
special office demanded, the appropriation to the public service 
of the best men without much regard to their opinions upon 
matters of private concern, charity for honest errors of judg- 
ment by public men, punishment with an unrelenting and mer- 
ciless hand of corruption and venality, swift reduction to pri- 
vate life of the unfaithful public officer, long service and cordial 
support of the faithful public servant, recognition of the value 
of good character in public life against assault, courtesy towards 
each other and personal friendship among political opponents, 
mutual confidence between political enemies in times of public 
danger, a readiness to compromise extreme opinions upon the 
basis of mutual concession — these, if I read the lesson of their 
lives correctly, were the qualities which made our fathers suc- 
cessful. Though few in numbers and weak in other resources, 
though surrounded by dangers apparently insurmountable, they 
were undismayed and unconquerable. Speaking through their 
own lives to us, their posterity, they seem to nie to recommend 
that we should protect our heritage and deliver it to our pos- 
terity by the exercise of the same virtuous qualities. 

It is said that in early days, when the future of Vermont was 
all uncertain, and enemies threaten her on every side, an Artist 
sketched her emblematic picture from a landscape which was 
spread out before him. We do not know his name, for he was 



520 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

only a private soldier, whose brush was a knife point, and whose 
canvass was the horn that kept his powder dry. In the fore- 
ground of his picture stood a lofty evergreen. It was the noble 
pine, emblem of the bravest clan of Scottish mountains — the 
unconquerable McGregor. Its trunk rose naked and majestic, 
skyward for many fathoms, and then threw out its branches on 
every side. It was a model of self-reliant independence, strong 
to resist the whirlwind and the storm. Beneath it stood that 
domestic animal whose product has given celebrity to your 
dairies and wealth to their owners. On the right their emblem 
of agriculture, the plough, stood in mid-furrow ; on the left 
hand the acres of yellow grain attested that harvest followed 
seed in its appointed time. For in the background were two 
mountain peaks, their bases fringed by broad intervals, shadowy^ 
valleys and rolling hills, which suggested quiet rivers and crysta 
brooks. Their flanks were covered as with a garment by dark 
forests, and their green tinted tops soared upward until they 
touched fleecy clouds which floated in an atmosphere of color- 
less purity. Across the depression between them rolled a wave of 
light which, spreading outward from a central focus, cast a soft 
halo over the whole landscape ; out of it, over the far horizon, 
flashed the morning beams of the rising sun. Mountain, valley 
hill, plain, forest and cleared field seemed to spring into life as 
they were touched by the warmth of its early harvest rays. 
Beneath the artist wrote the word Vermont, over it the words 
" Freedom and Unity." He was at once historian, painter, and 
prophet. He gave to Art a noble design, and to a State a motto 
and a seal. Vermont, the State which stands to-day in the 
prime and strength and full vigor of political manhood, an un- 
challenged witness of the patriotism and wisdom of her founders, 
and the virtues of their descendents. To-day we stamp this seal 
and motto upon the closed volume of our past history, and upon 
the title of the book wherein her future story is to be recorded. 
To-day, as her united and fortunate people stand around the 
common altar, let them invest every feature of this symbol with 
fresh significancy. As long as her mountains stand, let personal 
independence mark all the actions of her people. Let labor, 
industry, economy and temperance be recognized as common 



ORATION -LUCIUS E. CHITTENDEN. 521 

virtues. Let our children be taught the lesson of a brave and 
earnest loyalty to the State and to each other. Let strife and 
rivalry exist only in enterprises for the public good, lhen, 
when at the close of each coming century, her children come 
together as we do now to take counsel from the lives of their 
ancesters, and renew their resolutions for the preservation of 
the heritage, though other States may be whirled by the current 
of events toward revolution and ruin, there will be one State 
whose foundations only become more firm and strong as the 
weight of centuries settle them together— she is still the home 
of a free, virtuous, intelligent and brave people. Her name is 
Vermont, and her motto is "Freedom and Unity." 



THE AMERICAN AGE CONTRASTED, 

A CENTENNIAL ORATION BY HON. W. E. ARTHUR, 

DELIVERED AT THE LAYING OP THE CORNER STONE OF THE UNITED 
STATES BUILDING, COVINGTON, KY., JULY 4TH, 1876. 

The first of dramatists makes memory the warder of the brain ; 
and one of the first of thinkers, in ancient story, makes history 
philosophy teaching by example. The recurrence of this anni- 
versary, for the one-hundredth time, rouses the memory and en- 
forces the example. The heroic actors and events, in the origin 
of many States of renown, are obscured or colored in the shadow 
of fable ; the}' are often illusive images, mere mental phantasms. 
The heroic actors and events of republican America on the other 
hand, are eminently real in substance and distinct in outline. 
They are familiar in the emotions of popular affection — ideal- 
ized, — no doubt, but real ; fixed as venerated portraits of the 
past on the enduring canvass of history, the phenomena of their 
theories and of their practice still attract and instruct by their 
traditional presence. Indeed, their forms move, their voices 
speak, their eyes flash ; we feel their breath and their potential 
spell upon us. The great event thunders in the ear ; the heroic 
actors loom before the eye ; there is no mirage to obscure — no 
optical illusion to deceive. Their principles were founded in 
truth as unerring as the wisdom of creation ; and when we at- 
tenrpt to speak of their titanic works, measured by the visible re- 
sults which form the actual and the indestructable of our day, 
" fiction lags after truth, invention is unfruitful and imagination 
cold and barren." 

This warder of the brain, and this teacher of philosophy, to- 
day evoke the past, and now pass in review before us the memor- 
able actors and events of the origin of republican America. Thus 
we stand, in the emblematic presence of whatever is illustrious, 
venerated and conservative in the past, and in the noontide efful- 
gence of monumental trophies, which must elevate and guide us 
in the future. 



ORATION W. E. ARTHUR. 523 

Standing, as we now stand, inspired by such memories, and 
ennobled by such realities, at such a time, and in such a pres- 
ence, with solemn and imposing rites, the corner-stone has been 
laid of a massive and costly pile, for the administration of jus- 
tice, the receipt of revenue and the diffusion of intelligence. 

It is a fitting type of the solidity of our institutions, for it is 
as firm as the adamantine rock from which it was hewn ; it is 
a fitting emblem of our Federal Union, for it is Indiana marble, 
supported by Kentucky soil ; it is a fitting memorial of the 
benevolence of our form of government, for it is to establish jus- 
tice, diffuse intelligence, provide for the common defense, and 
promote the general welfare. In the language of Mr. Webster, 
we say : 

" Let it rise ! let it rise, till it meet the sun in his coming ; let 
the earliest light of the morning gild it, and parting day linger 
and play on its summit." 

The story of the origin and construction of our federative sys- 
tem, forms a link in the general development and progress of 
society at large. Political and personal complacency, ordinarily, 
on these occasions, prompt us to contemplate the events com- 
posing it, apart from their essential affinities in the stream of 
progression which rises from immutable laws ; but amid the 
vicissitudes which encompass every movement in the growth of 
the human race, the link is never broken, the affinities are never 
dissolved ; they are inseparably bound up with the functional 
mass of causes and effects which come before and follow after. 

Human destiny is a unit in the tendencies of human govern- 
ment ; man is everywhere and at all times, philosophically, the 
same dramatic actor in a world of vanishing forms and immu- 
table laws. States and nations, or other similar divisions or 
societies of men make, as strong as iron and as durable as brass, 
constitutions and compacts, institutes and codes, statutes and 
ordinances, and while yet they waking dream of the permanency 
of their statecraft, the fabric crumbles, and anon the remnants 
are fashioned into new forms, alike subject to like tempests of 
change. 

The political state of man is that of constitutional unrest ; his 
spiritual nature is dissatisfied with his human nature ; he is in a 



524 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

condition of internal conflict ; lie breaks over barriers which his 
imperfections interpose, and pushes away from what is, to what 
is to come ; the march of his career is over a rough road of irri- 
tating impediments, but it is a forward march. 

He confronts and tramples upon obstacles and disasters and 
strides over them — now constructing, now dissolving forms — 
impelled by immutable laws, his course is always onward. 
" Empires are only sand-hills in the hour-glass of Time ; they 
crumble spontaneously away by the process of their own 
growth." 

" States caring not what Freedom's price may be, 
May late or soon, but innst at last, be free." 

With our construction came Great Britain's colonial dissolu- 
tion. The political ligament which bound us to her glorious 
and indomitable races was severed forever. A century has 
elapsed since her colonial empire was dissolved as to us, and 
since the federal structure of these States was founded. The 
corner-stone of a most complex edifice was then laid, federal, 
state and municipal ; and while here the " sound of the axe, 
hammer and tool of iron," was keeping time with the music of 
falling forests, the war-whoop of the red man, the hum of in- 
dustry, and the grand diapason of the formation of Sovereign 
States — 

" A thousand years scarce serve to form a State. 
An hour may lay it in the dust,— " 

then red havoc burst upon Europe ; land and sea shook with 
the thunder of bat'le ; " the earthquake voice of victory," and 
started Britannia, whose march is o'er the mountain- waves," 
and whose "home is on the deep," maintained a long, bloody 
and doubtful, but finally triumphant, struggle for her very name 
and existence among the nations of modern times. 

Official abuses and popular excesses kindled and debased the 
French Revolution of 1789. The foundations of social order 
were uprooted. The monarchy, founded by Clovis the First, 
away back in the fifdi century, memorable for thirteen hun- 
dred years of imperial sway, was, like potter's vessel, shivered 
to atoms, and swept away with the rubbish of worn out forms ; 
the King and Queen beheaded, and the anarchy of the many. 



ORATION — W. E. ARTHUR. 525 

or the tyranny of the few, alternately shocked mankind with 
their competitive atrocities. All Europe trembled with the tread 
of the squadrons and blazed with the fire of musketry and can- 
non. 

Suddenly all mankind paused to gaze upon a first-rate figure, 
of antique mould and pensive aspect, yet in the dawn of youth. 
He was a lawyer's son, an orphan of Corsica, a school boy of 
Brienne, a sub-lieutenant of artillery. He left school distin- 
guished in mathematics, tolerably versed in history and geo- 
graphy, a laggard in Latin and other studies of his course. He 
appeared in the streets of Paris without a sou. He wrote to 
his mother "with my sword by my side, and Homer in my 
pocket, I hope to carve my way through the world." He not 
only arrested, he absorbed the attention of mankind, and he 
kept it. He advanced to the front ; he became the government 
of the ancient and shattered remnant of the brilliant empire of 
Louis the Fourteenth ; he stood forth the recognized Colossus 
of his era, if not of every era, 

" Underneath him the world's mountains lay 
Like mole hills, and her streams like lucid threads." 
He uplifted fallen and bleeding France. 
" Decayed in her glory, and sunk in her worth, 
He made her the gem and the wonder of earth." 

The story of this man is the story of vanishing forms — of the 
chaos of states. He was the resistless genius of war, and the 
peerless organizer of peace. Action was his divinity. After 
his glorious campaign in Italy he exclaimed, " They do not long 
preserve at Paris the remembrance of anything. My glory is 
declining. If I remain long unemployed I am undone." States 
.and empires rose and fell at his command, and crowns and 
kingdoms were as pawns. He scaled all. 

" The slippery tops of human state 
The gilded pinnacles of fate" 

Egypt, Austria, Italy, Switzerland, Hanover, Naples, Prussia, 
Russia, Westphalia, Spain, Holland, all continental Europe 
adorned his triumphal march, and came and went in his im- 
perial retinue. He obliterated and reconstructed the map of 
one continent, and plowed with his sword the mountains, plains 
and seas of three ; he eclipsed the ineffectual glory of Semira~ 



526 



OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 



mis and Tamerlane, of Clovis and Charlemagne, of Pyrrhus and 
Alexander, of Hannibal and Sciopio, of Csesar and Titus, of 
Conde and Marlborough ; he dominated all dominions and 
powers in his ubiquitous march, and, falling on the fields of 
Waterloo, crushed under a world in arms for his destruction, 
even as 

" A bubble bursting in the thunder cloud 
His course has novo.ition, and he drifts 
The passive plaything of the winds." 

France, glorious, fallen France, was virtually trusteed by the 
imperial conquerors, and the ancient monarchy rehabilitated. 
The successor of Clovis, in the person of Louis the Eighteenth, 
was crowned and sceptered by her armed enemies, and the 
map of Europe again dissected and patched up to suit the 
ephermeral fasliion of the new order of things ; and the dis- 
crowned hero-sage, even as the stricken bud of Jove, 

" Though his eyes 
Are shut, that looked uudazzled on the sun, 
He was the Sulton of the sty, and earth 
Paid tribute to his eyre." 

In the meantime Russia, Prussia and Austria fixed upon 
Poland the evil eye, and England finished her horoscope of the 
near future of Ireland. Poland, the ancient, the heroic, the un- 
fortunate ; the leonine site of the forest home of the warlike 
vandal, who first swept down upon imperial Rome, and with 
an audacity as imperial as that of Rome in her proudest days, 
fiercely battled to push from her seat the haughty mistress of 
the world ; founded as* a duchy in the sixth, and raised to a 
kingdom in the tenth century — the bower of beauty, the field 
of chivalry, and the native land of Kosciusko — consecrated by . 
the achievements and the memories of over twelve centuries of 
honorable antiquity — Poland was seized, pillaged and par- 
titioned by imperial rapacity, her very existence erazed from 
the map, and her beauty and valor slain, enslaved or exiled. 

" Wreathed, filleted, the victim fell renowned, 
And all her ashes will be holy ground." 

****** 

" Body hilling tyrants cannot hill 
Tho public soul — the hereditary will 
That downward, as from sire to son it goes, 
By shining bosoms nioie intensely glows; 



0RAT0IN W. E. ARTHUR. 527 

" Its heir-loom is the heart, and slaughtered men. 
Fight fiercer in their orphans o'er again- 
Poland recasts — though rich in heroes old — 
Her men in more and more heroic mould ; 
Her eaglo ensign, best among mankind 
Becomes, and types her eagle strength of mind.' 

Fate, too, closed in upon Ireland, and the " sweetest isle of 
the ocean " sank into the alien embrace of Albion, and into con- 
solidation with the empire of Great Britain. Long had been 
her struggle, painful her vicissitudes — heroic her spirit. The 
morning sun of the first coming of the nineteenth century 
shed its melancholy rays upon the spoliated sovereignty, de- 
jected children and prostrate form of a land whose inalienable 
freedom and whose gallant race are proudly traced to a hight 
of antiquity, to which England and Englishmen must forever 
remain unknown. From Phoenicia, from the vales of Pales- 
tine, the mountains of Lebanon and the shores of the Medi- 
terranean, with the bold spirit of the mountaineer, the fervid 
genius of the plain and the adventurous courage of the sea, two 
thousand years before history deigned to notice " perfidious 
Albon" or Imperial Caesar, sprang the free-born scions of Erin 
go Braugh ! And wherever thought that lifts the soul, eloquence 
that stirs the heart, song that enraptures the senses, valor that 
ennobles the spirit — or the union of all these forms in one per- 
son, the hero, the sage, the poet and the orator, there in the 
forefront, the formost among his peers, stands erect and daunt- 
less the son of Erin ! For four thousand years he has stood 
embattled in freedom's cause, wherever freedom bled ; for 
four thousand years through every variety of adverse fortune 
he maintained the sovereignty " of his own native isle of the 
ocean" — the independence of his own " seabeaten shore ; " and 
in his exile he exclaims : 

" Tet all its sad recollections suppressing, 

One dying •wish my lone bosom can draw ; 
Erin ! an exile, bequeaths thee his blessing I 

Land of my forefathers I Erin go bragh ! 
Buried and cold, when my heart stills her motion, 

Green be thy fields — sweetest isle of the ocean 1 
And thy harp -striking bards sing aloud^with devotion— 

Erin mavourneen — Erin go bragh." 

In a short time the restored Bourbon slept in the tomb of his 



528 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

royal line ; his successor wore his crown, and was speedily 
deposed, and Louis Phillippe feebly grasped the scepter of 
Charlemagne, only to experience exile ; wbile the star of the 
hero of Lodi and his son of Austerlitz were re-enkindled ; and 
the nephew of his uncle began and pursued an imperial career, 
alike brilliant in peace and in war. 

One midsummer's day he handed to the French town of 
Boulogne, on the shore of the English channel, with a tamo 
eagle, as the sole emblem of his title to the imperial crown of 
his uncle. On another day Sing Louis fled — and on another, 
Napoleon the Third was declared, by eight millions of voters, 
hereditary emperor of the French, by the grace of God and by 
the will of the people. The recognized first sovereign in 
Europe— the combined powers of the world, that with savage 
terror, had hunted down the first hero of his name to the sea- 
girt rock of St. Helena, that had tracked " the steps of glory to 
the grave," and pursued into the recesses of the tomb — 

" Shrine of the mighty ! can it be 
That this is all remains of thee?"— 

are now discovered courting his imperial alliance, espousing 
his imperial policy, and combining with his imperial arms. 

Great Britain that had united with the Russian and the Cos- 
sack, and had invoked the aid of all Europe, to extirpate the 
Uncle, now rejoiced in the friendly alliance of the Nephew for 
the destruction of the Russian and the Cossack, on the billows 
of the Black sea, and on the hights and plains of the Crimea. 
Then were re-enacted by the Nephew and his ally the deeds of 
Lodi, of Marengo, of Jena, of Austerlitz and of Eylau — at the 
siege of Sebastopol, on the banks of the Alma, in the battles of 
Balaklava and of Inkerman, in the sanguinary storming of the 
Malakoff and of the Redan, with "their looming bastions 
fringed with fire," and on the bloody field of Tchemaya, cul- 
minating in the retributive defeat and humiliation of the Czar 
of all the Russias. 

And subsequently Austria, another one of the imperial parti- 
cipators in the sacrifice of the Uncle, was in his turn beaten and 
humbled on the glorious fields of Magenta and of Solf erino, and 



ORATION W. E. ARTHUR. 529 

driven to implore protection from impending punishment in the 
peace of Villafranca. 

But Prussia had not forgotten her terrific sufferings on the 
dreadful field of Jena. She had been struck, trampled upon, 
lacerated and dismembered. No high-spirited race could cease 
to feel the rankling of such an accumulation of wounds, per- 
haps least of all, that branch of the Teutonic, the most warlike, 
and the most all-conquering type of man, that was, that is, and 
that is to be. 

" And if we do bnt watch the hour, 
There never yet was hnman power 
Which could evade, if unforgiven, 
The patient search and vigil long 
Of him who treasures np a wrong." 

Prussia had bided her time, had accumulated, consolidated 
and disciplined her resources, and perfected her squadrons. 
She had become the German Empire. She stretched away 
from the cloud-clapped peaks of the Tyrol Alps on the South, 
to the sea beach of the Baltic on the North, and from the banks 
of the Niemen and of the Vistula on the borders of Russia, to 
the shores of the Miselle and the summits of the Vosges moun- 
tains on the confines of France. 

In the name of the fatherland and of the unification of the 
German people, William the First, of the House of Hohenzol- 
len, unsheathed the sword of the Great Frederick, and side by 
side with Hilmuth Karl Bernard von Moltke, the first living 
soldier in Europe, in one single great battle dashed in pieces 
the military power of Austria on the field of Sadowa. He was 
now prepared, and like a good knight in the tournament, 
mounted, and with his lance in rest, awaiting his predestined 
antagonist ! Pretexts of state are never wanting. In an 
evil hour the Third Napoleon was betrayed into a declaration 
of war. Within twenty-five days a great French army was 
beaten at Worth ; within thirty days the grand army of 
Bazaine was beaten at Metz ; and anon another great French 
army was doubled up and destroyed at Sedan ; and in 
fine, the Emperor Napoleon, and one hundred and fifty 
thousand French soldiers with arms in their hands were made 
prisoners of war, and the fate of the third phase of the French 



530 OUH NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Empire sealed. At every point the French were bewildered, 
out-generaled and outnumbered. It did indeed, seem as though 
the genius of the First Napoleon animated the ubiquitous and 
irresistible enemies of the Third. 

So the wheel of fortune turned and turned again, and France, 
the ancient, the brilliant, the scientific, the speculative, the 
chivalric France, was torn, and trampled on and devastated and 
dismembered — bought her ransom with fabulous tribute, and, 
breathless and wasted, sought shelter 'neath the friendly cegis 
of republican forms, under the aged Thiers and the battle-scared 
McMahon. 

Such are the tracings of a few of the vanishing forms of one 
theater of the world, which has preceded our own in the known 
progress of civilization, and is far older in the course of historic 
time — while in the meantime, the work of development and con- 
struction continued, making up the magnificent pageant of the 
new. Such are the vicissitudes of states we call great, and of 
men we call famous. Such is fame ; and it is said by one of 
whom Macauley declares, " he had a head which statuaries loved 
to copy, and a foot the deformity of which the beggars in the 
streets mimicked " — that 

" Tis bat to fill 
A certain portion of uncertain paper : 
Some liken it to climbing up a hill, 

Whose summer, like all hills, is lost in vapor : 
For this men write, speak, preach, and heroes kilL 

And bards burn what they call their ' midnight taper.' 
To have, when the original is dust, 
A name." 

The forbidding continent of Africa has continued almost 
wholly void of philosophical events ; its natural fastnesses un- 
broken, its sourceless rivers and miasmatic lakes, unknown 
(save to the Mungo Parks and the adventurous Livingstons, who 
have seen and died), its mountain heights unexplored, its valleys 
shrouded and its treasures buried. Immersed in inhospitable 
and barbaric seclusion, it is draped in a sepulchral pall of soli- 
tude from the snow-wreathed summits of Kenia to the burning 
sands of Sahel. From the mouth of the Gambia to the Cape of 
Guardafui, and from the orange river to the Barbary States, 



ORATION— W. E. ARTHUR. 5ol 

there is still scarcely any dominion better than the dominion of 
the lion and of the jackal — scarce any society superior to that 
of the gorilla and the monkey. Battalions of elephants, regi- 
ments of hippopotami, brigades of the rhinoceros, and all the 
file of associate brutes, and legends of gibbering monkien and 
screeching hyenas, traverse the scenery and make nature di- 
abolical. The boundless j)lains of Sahara and the contiguous 
places, are still scourged by the fire-fiend of the simmoon and 
storm-beaten by the blazing sirocco. 

The Caucasian, scattered in sparce settlements along the 
coasts of the Indian and of the Atlantic oceans, and of the Arabian 
and of the Red seas, is still, now and then, encroaching a step 
upon the fathomless interior, hunting ivory on the coast, search- 
ing for diamonds and delving for gold, in the soil of Guinea, the 
mountains of Kong and the valleys of the Orange and of the 
Vaal. Throughout Soodan, Senegambia, and the two Guineas, 
the Ethiopian in all his worst varieties, the Hottentots, the 
Bushman, the Caffres, and the Gallas, 

" Kings that rule 
Behind the hidden sources of the Nile." 

still hover upon the dividing line between man and brute, and 
practice the lowest vices of both ; while here and there oc- 
casionally recur brighter spots, " like a rich jewel in Ethiop's 
ear," of Europeans, Moors, Arabs, Copts and Egyptians. 

Indeed Africa, in a moral sense, is so apparently dead, that it 
seems to be beyond the sphere of both immutable laws and 
vanishing forms. It seems chaos and night, without change. 
Will it continue to be the pariah of continents and the unresur- 
rected dead body of a civilization debauched and lost." 

The genius of the Fx'ench engineer has re-created the Isth- 
mus of Suez, pierced the solid earth and subdued the ageless 
barriers of nature; Asia and Africa now contemplate each 
other apart, the waters of the Mediterranean and the Red sea 
mingle between the continents, and the mercantile marine and 
the floating bulwarks of the nations of the world, double the 
Cape of Good Hope and come and go to and from China, Japan 
and Australia, through the Arabian sea and the Indian ocean. 



532 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

The everlasting Alps have finally surrendered their mighty 
ramparts " bulwarked round and armed with rising towers." 
Those continents piled end on end, away up in the region of 
perpetual snow, down whose rugged sides from plateau to pla- 
teau, and from peak to peak, into the abysm beneath, leap and 
thunder whole acres of blue transparent ice and crystal foam 
and glittering snow — among whose crags and glaciers and 
yawning chasms, and over whose dizzy summits slowly clam- 
bered the Carthagenians under Hannibal and the French un- 
der the first Napoleon — now become no more formidable than 
swinging pyramids or holiday pavillions, through which from 
one side cf the continent to the other in the space of twenty 
minutes, move train after train, in endless progression, in all the 
luxurious abandon of modern railway travel. 

Asia, reaching away from Kamtchatka and Corea to the 
strait of Babel Mandeb, and from Mt. Ophir and the Gulf of 
Siam to the Straits of Behring and the Gulf of Obi, " rich in the 
spoils of time," the mother of continents and the home of one 
half the people on the globe's face, of all countries the most 
stern, absolute, and inexorable in her paganistic forms — Asia is 
this day trembling, in every fibre of her hoary fabric, with the 
tramp of awakening progress. Man, here had his birth — man — 
creation's heir, " the most senseless and fit," 

" A noble animal, 
Splendid in ashes 
And pompous in the grave, 

on this spot was he cradled. 

Here burst upon time the great drama of the planet we in- 
habit. Over the uplands and planes of more than sixteen mil- 
lion square miles, washed by seven mighty seas and traversed 
by twelve great rivers — overlooked by those stupendous senti- 
nels of the upper skies, the mountain spires of Himialaya, 
twenty-nine thousand feet above the level of the sea — was 
enacted the wondrous pageant of Asiatic empire. The ima- 
gination becomes oppressed with visions of the glory and shame 
of the east, under the wizard spell of the names of Babylon and 
Nineveh, Jerusalem and Sidon, Tyre, and Palmyra, Antioch 



ORATION W. E. ARTHUR. 533 

and Susa, Eebatana and Persepolis, Selucia and Ephesus, of 
Bagdad and Aleppo, of Bassorah and Damascus. From this 
prolific seed-bed of all that is great and small in human pro- 
gress sprang the science, literature and all forms of growth of 
every era, race and clime. 

Along with imperial forests of Cyprus, ebony and myrtle, of 
rosewood and pine, of palm and mangrove and oak ; along with 
its gorgeous vegitation of oderiferous flowers and medicinial 
gums ; its groves of orange, banana, cocoanut and date, of mul- 
berry and olive, of peach and grape : along with its mines of 
diamonds and precious stones, its Ural gold and its Siberian 
silver, appeared and disappeared its generations of beautiful 
and brave, at once the ancestors and the posterity of all the 
virtues and vices which have either distinguished or disgraced 
the family of man. 

Here Creation's Lord, in the burning bush, and on Sinai's 
summit, taught the just ways of earth and the fixed laws of 
Heaven ; and here, as from the realm of Ale, have originated 
and raged those incantations sorceries, in forms of perverted 
conscience, and unhallowed faith ; hindooism, pantheism, 
buddhism, monotheism, dualism, Mohammedanism, babism 
and other mysteries and rites, which in the sacred name of 
religion, have enslaved and destroyed whole generations past. 

" God's most dreaded instrument. 
In working out a pure intent, 
Is man arrayed for mutual slaughter. 
Tea, carnage is his daughter." 

More than one-third part of the continent has already fallen 
under the control of Great Britain and Russia, and many flour- 
ishing settlements have been made there by the French, the 
Portuguese, and the Dutch. The ancient government of China 
has been made to tremble under the shock of successive insur- 
rections, menacing the stability of the whole senile system of 
absolutism, and its hitherto inaccessible internal "departments 
have been visited by the followers after Marco Polo, missionaries 
of Christianity and others, forming a sort of corps of observation 
or of flying scouts, in advance of the grand army, or of the 
schoolmaster of progress for the dissemination of the seeds of a 
higher civilization. 



534 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Embassies from Great Britain have subsequently reached the 
imperial presence of the Celestial Emperor, who has heretofore 
claimed the sovereignty of the world ; the East India company 
admitted to the privileges of commercial intercourse with his 
subjects ; the opium war and the ensuing war of the allies has 
been successfully waged, Canton bombarded and occupied by 
the English and the French ; the Celestial Empire has paid a 
ransom of more than twenty-one millions of dollars, sued for 
peace, ceded Hong Kong and other Celestial territory, opened 
wide her sealed ports to trade, and consummated treaties with 
England, France, Russia, and the United States ; and an Ameri- 
can citizen recruited into the service and accredited as the Min- 
ister of the Celestial Empire to declare to the nations of Chris- 
tendom, a change of Celestial policy, and overtures of interna- 
tional friendship. 

Japan has opened her ports and flung wide the gates of her 
cities ; sent and received ministers and commercial agents, and 
made and accepted official negociations of trade and intercourse; 
visited the United States officially in the person of an eminently 
influential member of the Imperial family with an imposing em- 
bassy ; consummated treaties, and admitted Americans and 
Europeans to positions of official authority in her internal ad- 
ministration, and in many ways is rapidly introducing and cul- 
tivating the ameliorating instrumentalities of the civilization of 
Christendom. 

South America, heretofore the romantic realm of the ancient 
Incas, and the interesting theater of the conquests of Pizarro, 
and of the tyranny and rapacity of the Spaniard ; abounding in 
mineral and metallic treasure, and in all the varied natural ele- 
ments of public and private opulence; with her tropical fruits 
and plants, her endless rivers and towering mountain chains, 
and encircling ocean coast lines — has become the grand arena 
of a flourishing civilization approximating our own. She is a 
young continential giant, breaking loose from all the iron preju- 
dices and barron forms of an imported effete civilization. She 
soon caught the inspiration of the example of her northern sister, 
and, stimulated to yet more enthusiastic exertions for independ- 
ence by the clarion voice and patriotic eloquence of our illustri- 



ORATION — W. E. ARTHUR. 535 

ous Clay, the sympathy of our people and the early recognition 
of our government, this favorite peninsula of the new world has 
already outstripped more ancient states in the race for popular 
liberty and political progress, and now gracefully sits in the cir- 
cle of the family of civilized nations, the central figure of a con- 
stellation of flourishing republican states. 

And now Mexico — destined to form our most southern 
frontier — intercepts our home view; there she lies, right across 
the tropic of Cancer, washed by to great oceans, by the Carib- 
bean sea, and by the Gulf of Mexico. She seems to have been, 
and to still be, the sport of fortune, the spoiled child of Nature, 
and the mockery of men. She is a serio-comic pagant within 
herself. Her valleys and hills are enamelled by profusions of 
the most beautiful fl< >wers, and fanned by soft breezes filled with 
the most fragrant odors. Her vegetable and mineral wealth 
resemble a universal mine, a boundless garden. All over San 
Luis Potosi, Sinaloa, Zaccatecas, Sonora, Ojaca and elsewhere, 
glitters the untold wealth of her deposits of gold and veins of 
silver, which in the past have poured into the lap of the world 
the enormous sum of four thousand millions of treasure. 

Even as that of the Hesperides, her birth dates from the realms 
of myth, and she follows the tracings other descent through the 
darkness and thf pageantry of romance. When she touches the 
sphere of the tangible, in the seventh century, we look upon the 
dominion of the stately Toltee, with his flowing tunic and gaudy 
sandal, immersed in the rudiments of mechanics and the mys- 
teries of the stars, who, in the lapse of centuries, falling a prey 
to the furies of domestic war and internal dissension, left his 
country to be devoured as by the dogs of Actean in all the after 
time. The Toltee migrated from the scene of his undoing. Then 
followed a sanguinary masquerade of races. The Cbichimecs, 
living in caverns and following the chase, worshipping the sun 
as their farther and the earth as their mother ; next came the 
Tlaxcalan, and drove him out, and the Tlaxcalan, in his turc^ 
was expelled by the Tepanees ; the latter were subsequently 
slaughtered by the Atzcapozalco, who afterwards fell under the 
Techichimees, who were subdued by the Acolhuis, who were con- 
quered by the Aztecs, and all the frantic races, with their inher* 



63G OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

ent vices of dissension, war and rapine, amalgamated into that 
fruitful progenitor and propagator of revolutions, the Mexican 
of the nineteenth century. He was at first beaten by his prede- 
cessors, but he finally triumphed, and inaugurated his system of 
chaos in a country which the divinity in nature has nut suffered 
him to destroy. 

The average Mexican's organ of revolution "is always in a 
state of chronic inflammation," with some lucid intervals, how- 
ever, as in the instance of the power, pomp and barbaric magnifi- 
cence imputed to the empire of the first Montezuma, the Louis 
the Fourteenth of tropical North America, after which it was 
conquered by the Spaniards under the banner of Cortez and 
paid tribute to the Spanish crown. A successful revolution sub- 
sequently broke the Spanish yoke, and Don Augustus Iturbide 
was made Emperor of Mexico; him, the Republicans, led by 
Santa Anna, deposed, and over a picturesque peninsula, filled 
with virgin gold and silver, carpeted with 1 irilliant flowers, fan- 
ned by fragrant odors and musical with the song of birds; fac- 
tion raged and races bled : Bravo, Perdraza, Guerrero, Busta- 
mente, Santa Anna, by turns rose and fell, with the gamut, in 
irregular succession, leaving the latter the topmost. Then came 
Miramon, after him Juarez, a man of affairs; then ensued the 
war with France, and the imperial episode of Maximillian of 
Austria, who was nobly crowned and ignobly shot; and now 
the land of the Toltees and of the Aztecs dwells iu the bonds of 
an exotic peace, under republican forms and the presidency of 
Lerda de Tejada. 

Lying between the thirty-fifth and the forty-fifth degrees of 
north latitude, and between the tenth degrees of east and the 
second degree west longitude, from the meridian of Washing- 
ton — from colonial Georgia to colonial Massachusetts, a little 
fringe of primitive soil, " a little speck, a small seminal princi- 
ple rather than a formed body," on the coast of the Atlantic 
ocean, on the border of an unreclaimed continent of wilderness 
we observe the then obscure, but since illustrious scenery, in 
the midst of which, the venerable founders less than three mil- 
lions strong, of the American system of liberty and law, main- 
tained their protracted, sanguinary, but finally triumphant 



ORATION W. E. ARTHUR. 537 

struggle against the civilized legions of the white man, from tho 
Old World, in the front, and the savage hordes of the red man 
from the New, m the rear. There we left the immortal foun- 
der busy in the formation of free states — 

" A pillar of State ; deep on his front engraven 
Deliberation, sat and public care. 

* * * • 

Sage he stood, 
"With Atlantean shoulders, fit to bear 
i The weight of mightiest monarchies; his look 

Drew audience and attention still as night 
Or summer's noontide air." 

Lying between the twentieth and the seventieth degrees of 
north latitude, and between the tenth degree of east and the 
fiftieth degree of west longtitude from the meridian of Wash- 
ington, from the Lake of the Woods on the north, to Cape 
Sable on the south, from Maine to Alaska, and from the Albe- 
marle Sound to the Bay of San Francisco, we now behold a 
civilized continent of free states, a population of over forty- 
four millions and a wealth of perhaps forty-five thousand mil- 
lions that far surpasses, in origin and progress, all that is im- 
agined in the most wondrous empires of antiquity ; a continent 
of free states in the bonds of peace, and, let me say, in the com- 
munion of love, in the uninterrupted enjoyment of all the stu- 
pendous rosults of the American system of liberty and order 

" And sovereign law, the states' collected will, 
O'er thrones and globes elate, 
Sits empress, crowning good, repressing ill." 

Down deep in the philosophy of nature, imbedded in the 
granite of her immutable laws, away below the plummet line of 
vanishing forms, the builders set the corner-stone, and under- 
lying truisms of our state fabric. They assert that man is the 
first figure in creation's bounds ; he is his own equal ; his nat- 
ural rights, generalized, are life, liberty and the pursuit of hap- 
piness. These rights are inherent and inalienable ; he alone is 
sovereign, and he alone is the source of all legitimate law. Law 
is the rule of right, prescribed by himself, to himself, for his own 
government ; to this end government is instituted by him, and 
rests on his consent, and his will may alter or abolish it, and 
institute it anew of such principles and forms as seem most 



538 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

likely to secure his safety and happiness, of which he alone is 
the judge. Rightful government is, therefore, never his master, 
it is always his instrument ; and when he becomes disciplined 
by it, it sustains bim, by the action of his own justice on his 
own wrong. 

His nature is social, therefore his safety and happiness lie in 
union, and union is mutual dependence, and hence laws and 
forms are the bonds of union. In union he is but one among 
many, who are all equals, and the whole can act best for the 
whole, by a few; hence the necessity for common agencies; 
popular representation; wheret>y to apply the law and the 
forms alike to all; and as all delegated power tends to abuse, it 
must be verified of record, be defined and limited by specific, 
enumerated grants, and by inflexible reservations; and those 
grants of power must be subdivided and distributed into co- 
ordinate departments; and the legislative power must be re- 
stricted to the first, the judicial power to the second, and the 
executive power to the third; and any, the least, encroachment 
or fusion, must be jealously guarded against, as incompatible 
with the liberty, the safety, and the happiness of the people. 
No human power exists, no human power can be lodged any- 
where, not even in the government of the whole, to intervene 
between the individual conscience and its maker; and all re- 
ligions and forms of worship of Him, must ever remain free and 
inviolable, for the maintenance of which freedom and inviolabil- 
ity, all delegated and reserved power is sacredly and irrevocably 
pledged. Man's speech shall be free; his press shall be free; 
his right of self-defence shall be free; he shall be secure in his 
person, papers and effects; shall be protected from arbitrary 
seizures and searches; shall be entitled to trial by an impartial 
jury of the vicinage; his right of property shall be maintained 
inviolable ; the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall be 
omnipresent and absolute; justice shall be administered be- 
tween the poor and the rich, between the governed and the gov- 
erning, fairly, freely and impartially; without sale, denial 
or delay, under the principles and forms of law made before the 
fact. 

These, brief!) 7 adverted to, are some of the familiar but sub- 



ORATION — W. E. ARTHUR. 539 

lime pillars of natural and political truth, which support our 
whole municipal, state and federal fabric, and spread out un- 
der and over it, like the fruitful earth beneath us, and the be- 
nignant sky above us. 

Forms we have, appearing and vanishing, and they have, 
indeed, chased each other like harlequins or like furies, over the 
plane of our progress ; but those natural and political truths 
are not the forms which vanish ; they are of the laws which are 
immutable. A bare suggestion of a few of the fruits of our 
progress surpasses all the exaggerations of panegyric. 

The thread of human life is yet unbroken, which is coeval 
with the day of the proclamation of our declaration of independ- 
ence one hundred years ago, and even now, within the compass 
of that one life, we number over forty-four millions of free peo- 
ple, self governing and invincible, with an area of over three 
and a half million square miles in extent ; with more than 
eight million families, in more than seven million dwellings, 
with more than one square mile of land for every ten persons ; 
with an assessed valuation of property of over thirty thousand 
millions of dollars, and of a real value in possession of perhaps 
over forty-five thousand million ; with an annual foreign trade, 
in imports and exports, of over thirteen hundred millions" of 
dollars. 

Over six million of American farmers count within their boun- 
dary lines over four hundred million acres of land, assessed at a 
valuation of over nine thousand million of dollars ; with herds of 
live stock assessed at over one thousand five hundred million of 
dollars ; with working implements and machinery assessed at 
over three hundred and thirty-six million of dollars ; with an 
annual production valued at over two thousand four hundred 
million of dollars ; with an annual harvest, in bushels, of cereal 
products of over two hundred and eighty-seven million of wheat; 
of over seventeen million of rye ; of over seven hundred and sixty- 
one million of corn ; of over two hundred and eighty-two million 
of oats ; of over twenty -nine million of barley ; of over ten million 
of buckwheat ; of fibrous productions, of over five million bales of 
cotton, of four hundred pounds to the bale ; of over twenty- 
seven million pounds of flax ; of over twelve thousand tons of 



540 



OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 



hemp ; of over one hundred and two million pounds of wool ; of 
over twenty-seven million tons of hay ; of over twenty-five mil- 
lion pounds of hops ; of over seventy-three million pounds of rice; 
of over two hundred and sixty-three million pounds of tobacco ; 
of over eighty-seven thousand hogsheads of cane, and of over 
twenty-nine million pounds of maple sugar ; of over twenty-four 
million gallons of molasses ; of over one hundred and sixty-five 
million bushels of potatoes ; of over five million bnshels of peas 
and beans ; of over fifteen million pounds of bees' honey ; of over 
three million gallons of domestic wine ; of over five hundred and 
fourteen million pounds of butter ; of over fifty-four million 
pounds of cheese ; of over two hundred and thirty-six million 
gallons of milk. 

With over two hundred and fifty-three thousand manufactur- 
ing establishments ; with a capital of over two thousand million 
of dollars, and materials valued at over two thousand five hun- 
dred million of dollars, and productions valued at over four 
thousand two hundred million of dollars, employing over two 
million of persons, with wages of over eight hundred million of 
dollars ; with over eight thousand mining establishments, with a 
capital of over two hundred and twenty-three million ; with ma- 
terials valued at over fifteen millions; with productions valued 
at over one hundred and fifty-six millions, employing over one 
hundred and fifty-four thousand persons, with wages of over 
seventy-four millions of dollars. 

With over one hundred and forty-two thousand colleges and 
schools, with an income of over ninety-six million of dollars ; with 
over two hundred and twenty-one thousand teachers ; with over 
eight million pupils ; with over one hundred and sixty-five thou- 
sand libraries, containing over forty-six million volumes. 

With over eight thousand newspapers, with a circulation of 
over twenty-one millions, with a daily issue of over two million 
six hundred thousand copies, and with an annual issue of over 
one thousand and six hundred million copies. 

With over seventy-three thousand church organizations, with 
over twenty-two million sittings, with over sixty-three thousand 
churches, with property valued at over three hundred and fifty- 
five millions of dollars. 



ORATION — W. £. AUTHOR. 541 

While our systems of telegraphy and railway are the new tes- 
tament of a boundless civilization and the heralds, by laud and 
by sea, of the millenium of intercourse and commerce. 

Yv'ith a naval and mercantile marine whitening every sea, and 
saluted in every harbor; and a citizen soldiery, 

"Men who their duties know, 
But know their rights, and knowing, dare maintain." 

The brightest examples of antiquity, of the middle ages, or 
of modern times, cannot dim the lustre of the founders of our 
civil and political system. Measured by the purity of their 
lives, they stand foremost among tbeir equals; measured by the 
grandeur and beneficence of their works, they certainly have no 
superiors, probably no equals, in the annals of mankind. As 
for the most part ihe originators, as wholly the builders, and as 
pre-eminently the champions of that system of polity which rests 
in its sublime strength upon the intellectual capacity, and the 
moral duty of man, f >r self-government they signally embody, 
in every vicissitude of their heroic career, in war and in peace, 
the noblest models of human virtue, wisdom, fortitude and dig- 
nity, for the study, the admiration, the veneration and the prac- 
tice of all aftertimes. 

" Low in glory *s lap they lie ; 
Streaming splendor throngh the sky. 
Nor sink those stars in empty night, 
They hide themselves in heaven's own light." 

Their public and private letters, their state papers, speeches, 
documents and miscellaneous writings, possess a masculine 
strength, a native delicacy, a depth of philosophy, an elevation 
of diction and a knowledge of nations and of men, which reward 
the study of scholars, patriots and statesmen, and form a politi- 
cal literature of American classics, which has never been equal- 
ed, and which will, perhaps, never be excelled. 

No man can study the thoughts and words of Washington, of 
Franklin, of the Adamses, of Hamilton, of Henry, of Jefferson, 
of Madison, of Marshall, without experiencing a loftier concep- 
tion of the moral and intellectual nature and dignity of his race, 
without feeling the quickened pulsation of a nobler humanity 
and a more elevated patriotism. 



542 onn national jubilee. 

No man is faultless ; no character can .ever be perfect. The 
annals of the great display many remarkable men. Agamem- 
non was great in kingly station, Achilles was great in arms, Nes- 
tor was wise in council, and Ulysses was eloquent in debate, 
Csesar and Napoleon, each in his sphere excelled — indeed stand 
pre-eminent in the dazzling combination of the splendid quali- 
ties which " surpass or subdue mankind ; " but out of the cloud 
of their blemishes, they looked down and, "gashed with honor- 
able scars," fell by the hate of those below. In George "Wash- 
ington the splendid qualities which " surpass or subdue man- 
kind," were so softened and purified in combination with those 
which make man re-form himself in the image of his Maker, and 
steadily ascend to still nobler heights in the scale of moral ex- 
cellence ; that in his own and in foreign lands, he "is first in 
war, first in peace, and first in the hearts of his countrymen :" 

" Where may the wearied eye repose 

When gazing on the great, 
Where neither guilty glory glows, 

Nor despicable state I 
Yes, one — tho iirst — the last— the best — 
The Cincinnatns of the west, 
Whom envy dared not hate— 
Bequeathed the name of Washington 
To make men blush there is bat one." 



THE ILIAD OF PATRIOTISM. 

AN ADDEESS BY LION. J. G. M. RAMSEY, M. D., PRESIDENT 
OF THE TENN. HISTORICAL SOCIETY. 

read by rev. t. a, hoyt, at the centennial celebration at nash- 
ville, tenn., july 4th, 1876. 

Mr. President and Gentlemen of the Historical Society 
Ladies and Gentlemen : — It gives me pleasure to comply with 
the request of the Historical society and of its honored Presi- 
dent, Dr. Ramsey, I hold in my hand his contribution to this 
centennial occasion. It merits your attention. Its author is 
the head of this honorable body, whose labors are directed to 
preserve the memorials of your past history. He is the his- 
torian of Tennessee : he is venerable for age, for wisdom, for 
virtue ; he is at once a patriot, a saint, a sage. Standing on 
the verge of life, he speaks to us with the authority of an 
ancient oracle. Let ingenuous youth imbibe freely the influence 
of his example ; let them ponder well the lessons of his life. 

He imparts those lessons here not in the vagueness of theories 
of virtue, but by citing signal instances of it. This narrative 
he would have stored in your memories, and reproduced in the 
elevation of your sentiments. It may be entitled, " the Iliad of 
Patriotism." 

This is the centennial year — the one hundredth anniversary 
of the birth of American Independence. 

The question naturally arises, what part did Tennessee per- 
form in gaining that independence? She was not one of the 
thirteen colonies ; there were but two or three small white set- 
tlements within her borders. 

He relates the struggles of the early settlers with the Indians ; 
the steady growth of the infant colony ; the formation of the 
two counties ; their voluntary annexation to North Carolina, 
and then rjroceeds to recount as follows their prowess and for- 
tunes in the Revolutionary war : 



544 OUB NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

After the signal repulse of Sir Peter Parker from Charleston 
in 177G, the Southern States had a respite from British attack 
and invasion. The conquest of the States was thereafter at- 
tempted from the North to the South. The war continued to 
rage with varied success. But in 1778 the order of invasion 
from this time was inverted, and his Majesty's arms were di- 
rected against the most Southern States. On the 29th of De- 
cember, Savannah, the capital of Georgia, was taken, and soon 
after British posts were established as far into the interior as 
Augusta. Gen. Lincoln, then the commandant of the Southern 
department, sent a detachment of fifteen hundred North Caro- 
lina malitia under Gen. Ashe, to oblige the enemy to evacuate 
the upper part of Georgia. The detachment was surprised by 
Gen. Provost and entirely defeated. The Southern army was 
nearly broken up. The quiet possession of Georgia by the 
enemy brought to their aid many of the Indians and of the 
loyalists, who had fled from the Carolinas and Georgia and 
taken refuge among them. These were now emboldened to col- 
lect from all quarters and under cover of Provost's army. It 
became evident that all that was wanting to complete British 
ascendency in the South, was the possession of Charleston. 
Should that metropolis, and the army that defended it, be cap- 
tured, the reduction of the whole State, and probably North 
Carolina also, would ensue. An immense army with a large 
supply of amunition invested Charleston. The defense was pro- 
tracted, under every discouragement and disadvantage, from the 
27th of March to the 12th of May, when Gen. Lincoln found 
himself obliged to capitulate. The fall of the metropolis was 
soon after succeeded by the rapid conquest of the interior coun- 
try, and from the sea west to the mountains, the progress of the 
enemy was almost wholly an uninterrupted triumph. The 
inhabitants generally submitted, and were either paroled as 
prisoners, or took protection as British subjects. A few brave 
and patriotic men under gallant and indomitable leaders re- 
mained in arms, but were surprised and cut to pieces by Tarleton 
and Webster, or, for security from their pursuit, withdrew into 
North Carolina. The march of the enemy was continued toward 
the populous Whig settlements, and garrisons were established 



ADDRESS — J. G. M. RaMSEY 545 

at prominent points of the country, with the view of pushing 
their conquests still further into the interior. In fine, South 
Carolina was considered a subdued British province rather than 
an American State. 

But in the midst of the general submission of the inhabitants, 
there remained a few unconquerable spirits whom nothing but 
death could quell. These were Sumter, Marion and Williams in 
South Carolina, and Clark and Twiggs in Georgia. Some of 
these retired, with an inconsiderable number of men, into North 
Carolina, some of whom crossed the mountains and imparted to 
the Western settlers the first intelligence that had reached Wa- 
tuga of the conquest and atrocities of the enemy. The frontier- 
men had left parents and kindred and countrymen east of the 
Alleghanies, and their hearts yearned for their safety and deliver- 
ance. The homes of their youth were pillaged by the foreign 
soldiery, and the friends they loved were slain or driven into ex- 
ile. Above all, the great cause of American freedom and inde- 
pendence was in danger, the country was invaded by a powerful 
foe, and the exigencies of Carolina called aloud for every absent 
son to return to her rescue and defence. The call was promptly 
obeyed, and the mountainmen — the pioneers of Tennessee — were 
the first to resist the invaders of the South, and restrained not 
from the pursuit of the vanquished enemy till they reached the 
coast of the Atlantic. 

1780. — Heretofore the military services of the Western soldiery 
had been limited to the defense and protection of their secluded 
homes in the wilderness, and to the invasion of the country of 
the hostle Cherokee and Shawnee Indian tribes. The riflemen 
from the backwoods had never seen a British soldier or met the 
discipline and skill of a foreign enemy. It remained to be de- 
monstrated whether the success which had ever attended their 
encounters with the savage foe, would continue to crown their 
military operations with a civilized enemy, and upon the new 
theatre now opening up before them where an opportunity oc- 
curred for the solution of the question. 

1780. — Gen. Rutherford, of North Carolina, issued a requisi- 
tion for the militia of that State to embody for the defense of 
their sister State. That order reached Watauga, and the follow- 



546 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

ing proceedings were immediately bad in that patriotic and gal- 
lant community. They are copied from the original manuscript, 
almost illegible from the ravages of time and exposure, though 
still showing plainly the bold and characteristic chirography oi 
Col. Sevier and the commissioned officers under him. There is 
no preamble, no circumlocution — nothing but action, prompt and 
decisive action, and the name of tbe actors. " At a meeting of 
sundry of the militia officers of Washington county, this 19th day 
of March, 1780, present John Sevier, colonel ; Jonathan Tipton, 
major ; Joseph Wilson, John M. Webb, Godfrey Isbell, Win. 
Trimble, James Stinson, Kobert Sevier, captains ; and Landon 
Carter, lieutenant in the absence of Valentine Sevier, captain." 

A similar requisition was made upon Isaac Shelby, the colonel 
of Sullivan county. He was then absent in Kentucky when the 
dispatch reached him June 16. He immediately returned home. 
His appeal to the chivalry of Sullivan county was met by a hearty 
response, and early in July he found himself at tbe head of two 
hundred mounted riflemen, whom he rapidly led to the camp of 
McDowell, near the Cherokee ford of Broad River in South Car- 
olina. Col. Charles McDowell had, in the absence of Gen. Ruther- 
ford taken prisoner at Camden, succeeded that officer in com- 
mand when he had forwarded to Sevier and Shelby a dispatch 
informing those officers of the capitulation of Charleston, and the 
capture of the whole Southern army, and that the enemy had 
overrun South Carolina and Georgia and was rapidly approach- 
ing the limits of North Carolina ; and requesting them to bring- 
to his aid all the riflemen that could be raised, and in as short 
time as possible. Sevier had already enrolled under the requi- 
sition of Gen. Rutherford one hundred of the militia of Washing- 
ton county. At his call one hundred others immediately volun-. 
tered, and with these two hundred mounted riflemen he started 
at once across the mountain for the camp of McDowell, where he 
arrived a few days before the arrival of Shelby. Col. Clarke, of 
Georgia, with a command of refugee Whigs was at the same time 
at McDowell's headquarters. 

In the meantime the British army had taken post at Ninety- 
Six, Camden and Cheraw. At the former place Col. Nesbit 
Balfour, commandant, issued his proclamation, in which he 



ADDRESS J. G. M. RAMSEY. 541 

gave notico " That every inhabitant of this Province who is not 
at his own house by the 24th instant, is hereby declare J an out 
law, and is to be treated accordingly, and his property, of what- 
ever kind, confiscated and liable to military execution.'' This 
was a phase of tyranny and military usurpation at which the 
plain common sense of justice of the volunteer riflemen revolted. 
They had learned also in their conference with the refugee 
"Whigs under Clark, something of the atrocious cruelties prac- 
ticed by the Tories and their British leaders. 

Lord Cornwallis, meeting with little obstruction in his vic- 
torous march, contemplated an extension of his conquest 
through North Carolina. He had instructed the loyalists of 
that State not to rise until his approach to its southern bound- 
ary would favor their concentration with his forces and at the 
same time intimidate the Wnigs. As he approached Camden, 
Col. Patrick Moore appeared at the head of a large body of dis- 
affected Americans, and erecting the royal standard, invited 
to it all the loyalists in that scetion. The rapid successes of the 
enemy and his near approach greatly encouraged the rising 
of the Tories, and Colonel Moore, after an uninterrupted 
march, took post in a strong fort built by Glen. Williamson four 
years before, during the Cherokee war. It was surrounded by 
a strong abattis and was otherwise well provided with defenses. 

Such was the position of affairs when the Western riflemen 
arrived, as has been seen, at the camp of McDowell. They 
were, at their own request, immediately detached against Moore. 
His post was more than twenty miles distant. The riflemen 
took up the line of march at sunset,, and at the dawn of day 
next morning surrounded the fort. Shelby sent in one of his 
men and made a peremptory demand of the surrender of the 
Fort. To this Moore replied that he would defend it to the 
last extremity. This suited exactly the mettle of the assailants 
and their lines were immediately drawn in, within musket-shot 
of the enemy all round, with a determination to make an 
assault upon the fort. 

But before proceeding to extremities, a second message was 
sent in. To this Moore replied that he would surrender on 
condition that the garrison be paroled not to serve again during 



648 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

tlio war. The assailants were as humane as they were brave, 
and to save the effusion of the blood of the deluded loyalists, the 
terms were agreed to. The fort was surrendered. Ninety- 
three loyalists and one British Serjeant-Major were in the gar- 
rison, with two hundred and fifty stand of arms, all loaded with 
ball and buck-shot, and so disposed of at the port holes that 
double . the number of the Whigs might have been easily re- 
pulsed. 

This bold and unexpected incursion of the mountain men, to- 
gether with the capture of the garrison under Col. Moore, in- 
duced Lord Cornwallis to detach from his main army some en- 
terprising officers, with a small command, to penetrate through 
the country, embody the loyahsts and take possession of the 
strongest posts in the interior. This had become the more ne- 
cessary as the advance of the American army under DeKalb, 
and afterward under Gates, began to inspirit the desponding 
Whigs, and at the same time restrained the vigorous co-opera- 
tion of the Tories with the British troops. Measures were there- 
fore adopted to embody and discipline the zealous loyahsts, and 
for this purpose Col. Ferguson, an active and intelligent officer, 
possessing peculiar qualifications for attaching to him the 
marksmen of Ninety-six, was dispatched in that district. " To 
a corps of one hundred picked regulars he soon succeeded in at- 
taching twelve or thirteen hundred hardy natives. This camp 
became the rendezvous of the desperate, the idle and the vindic- 
tive, as well as the youth of the loyahsts, whose zeal or ambition 
prompted them to military service." 

Astonished by the bold and unexpected incursion of the west- 
ern volunteer riflemen under Shelby and Sevier, and apprehend- 
ing that the contagion of the example and their presence might 
encourage the Whigs of Carolina to resume their arms, Fergu- 
son and the loyahsts took measures to secure the allegiance of 
the inhabitants by written agreements entered into and signed 
by disaffected American officers in the military service. By 
such and other means were the resident Whigs dispirited and 
the ranks of the British and Tories hourly enlarged. 

As he advanced, Ferguson, increased his command till it 
amounted to above two thousand men, in addition to a small 



ADDKESS 3. G. M. EAMSEY. 5J9 

squadron of horse. To watch their movements and if possible 
to cut off their foraging parties, Col. McDowell soon after the 
surprise and capture of Col. Moore, detached Col. Shelby and 
Clarke with six hundred mounted riflemen. Several attempts 
were niade by Ferguson to surprise this party, but, in every in- 
stance his designs were baffled. However, on the first of August 
1780, his advance of six or seven hundred men came up with the 
American party under Shelby and Clarke at a place called Cedar 
Spring, where they had chosen to fight them. A sharp conflict 
ox half an hour ensued, when Ferguson came up with his whole 
force and the Americans withdrew, carrying off with them 
from the field of battle twenty prisoners and two British 
oinceis. The killed of the enemy was not ascertained. The 
American loss was ten or twelve killed and wounded. Re- 
ceiving information that a party of four or five hundred Tories 
were encamped at Musgrove's Mills, on the South side of Euoree 
River, about forty miles from his camp, McDowell again de- 
tached Shelby and Clarke, together with Col. "Williams who had 
joined his command, to surprise and disperse them. Ferguson 
lay, with his whole force at that time, exactly between. The 
detachment amounted to six hundred horsemen. These took 
up their line of march just before sundown, on the evening of 
the 18th of August. They went through the woods until dark, 
and then took a road leaving Ferguson's camp some three or 
four miles to the left. They rode very hard all night, and at 
the dawn of day, about half a mile from the enemy's camp, were 
met by a strong patrol party. A short skirmish followed, when 
the enemy retreated. At that moment a countryman living- 
close at hand, came up and informed tne party that the enemy 
had beeu reinforced the evening before with six hundred regu- 
lar troops, under Col. Ennes, which were destined to join Fer- 
guson's army. The circumstances of this information were so 
minute that no doubt could be entertained of its truth. For 
six hundred men, fatigued by a night ride of forty miles, to 
march and attack the enemy thus reinforced, seemed rash and 
improper. 

To attempt an escape by a rapid retreat, broken down as 
were both men and horses, as equally hopeless, if not impossi- 



550 



OUK NATIONAL JUBILEE. 



"ble. The heroic determination was, therefore, instantly formed 
to make the best defence they could under the existing circum- 
stances. A rude and hasty breastwork of brush and old logs 
was immediately constructed. Capt. Inman was sent forward 
with about twenty-five men to meet the enemy and skirmish 
with them as soon as they crossed the Enoree. The sound of 
their drums and bugles soon announced their movements, and 
induced the belief that they had cavalry. Inman was ordered 
to fire upon them, and retreat according to his own discretion. 
This stratagem drew the enemy forward in disorder, as they be- 
lieved they had driven the whole party. When they came up 
within seventy yards a most destructive fire from the riflemen, 
who lay concealed behind their breastwork of logs, commenced. 
It was one whole hour before the enemy could force the Ameri- 
cans from their slender defence, and just as they began to give 
way in some points, the British commander, Colonel Ennes, was 
wounded. 

All his subaltans, except one, being previously killed or 
wounded, and Captain Hawsey, the leader of the loyalists on 
the left, being shot down, the whole of the enemy's hue began 
to yield. The riflemen pursued them close and drove them 
across the river. In this pursuit the gallant Inman was killed, 
bravely fighting the enemy, hand to hand. In this action Col. 
Shelby commancled the right, Col. Clarke the left, and Col. Wil- 
liams the centre. 

The battle lasted one hour and a half. The Americans lay s< i 
closely behind their little breastwork, that the enemy entirely 
overshot them, killing only six or seven, amongst whom the loss 
of the brave Captain Inman was particularly regretted. His 
stratagem of engaging and skirmishing with the enemy until 
the riflemen had time to throw up a hasty breastwork — his gal- 
lant conduct during the action and his desperate charge upon 
their retreat — contributed much to the victory. He died at the 
moment it was won. The number of the enemy killed and 
wounded was considerable. The Tories were the first to es- 
cape. Of the British regulars, under Col. Ennes, who fought 
bravely to the last and prolonged the conflict, even against hope, 
above two hundred were taken prisoners. 

The Americans returned immediately to their horses and 



A I 'DRESS — J. G. M. RAMSEY. 551 

mounted with the determination to be in Ninety-Six before 
night. This was a British post less than thirty miles distant, 
and not far from the residence of Col. Williams, one of the 
commanders. It was considered best to push their successes 
into the disaffected regions, before time would allow reinforce- 
ments to reach them. Besides by marching their scant expe- 
dition in the direction of Ninety-Six, they would avoid Fergu- 
son's army, n ar whose encampment they would necessarily 
have to pass on their return to McDowell's headquarters, at 
Smith's Ford. At the moment of starting an express from 
McDowell, rode up in great haste with a short letter in his hand 
from Gov. CasswelL dated on the battle ground, apprising Mc- 
Dowell of the defeat of the American grand army under Gates, 
on the sixteenth, near Camden, advising him to get out of the 
way, as the enemy would no doubt endeavor to improve their 
victory to the greatest advantage, by cutting up all the small 
corps of the American armies. The men and the horses were 
fatigued by the rapid march of the night as well as by the 
severe conflict of the morning. They were now encumbered 
with more than two hundred British prisoners and the spoils of 
victory. Besides these difficulties now surrounding the Ameri- 
can party, there was an another that made extrication from 
them dangerous, if not impossible. A numerous army under 
an enterprising leader lay in their rear, and there was every 
reason to believe that Ferguson would have received intelligence 
of the daring incursion of the riflemen and of the defeat of his 
friends at the Enoree. The delay of an hour might have proved 
disastrous to the victors, the prisoners were immediately dis- 
tributed among the companies, so as to have one to every three 
men, who carried them alternately on horseback. They rode 
directly towards the mountains, and continued the march all 
that day and night and the succeeding day, until late in the 
evening, without ever stopping to refresh. This long and rapid 
march — retreat it can hardly be called, as the retiring troops 
bore with them the fruits of a well-earned victory — saved the 
Americans, for, as was afterwards ascertained, they were pur- 
sued closely until late in the evening of the second day after the 
action by Maj. Dupoister and a strong body of mounted men 
from Ferguson's army. These became so broken down by ex- 



552 



OUE NATIONAL JUBILEE. 



cessive fatigue in hot weather, that they despaired of overtak- 
ing the Americans, and abandoned the pursuit. 

Shelby, having seen the party and its prisoners beyond the 
reach of danger, retired across the mountains. He left the 
prisoners with Clarke and Williams to be carried to some place 
of safety to the North, for it was not known then that there was 
even the appearance of a corps of Americans anywhere south of 
the Potomac. So great was the panic after the defeat of Gen. 
Gates at Camden, and the subsequent disaster of Sumter, that 
McDowell's whole army broke up. He, with several hundred of 
his followers, yielding to the cruel necessity of the unfortunate 
circumstances which involved the country, retired across the 
mountains, and scattered themselves among the hospitable set- 
tlers in the securer retreats of Nollacbucky and Watauga. 

1780. — At this period a deep gloom hung over the cause of 
American Independence, and the confidence of its most stead- 
fast friends was shaken. The reduction of Savannah, the capi- 
tulation at Charleston and the loss of the entire army under 
Gen. Lincoln, had depressed the hopes of the patriot Whigs, and 
the subsequent career of British conquest and subjugation of 
Georgia and South Carolina, excited serious apprehension and 
alarm for the eventual success of the American cause. At the 
urgent appeal of the patriotic Gov. Rutledge, Virginia had sent 
forward reinforcements under Col. Buford. His command was 
defeated and his men butchered by the sabres of Tarleton. At 
Camden a second Southern army commanded by Gen. Gates, 
was dispersed, captured and signally defeated by Cornwallis. 

But besides these general disasters, there were other circum- 
stances that aggravated this discouraging condition of American 
affairs. The finances of Congress were low ; the treasuries of the 
States were exhausted and their credit entirely lost ; a general 
financial distress pervaded the country ; subsistence and cloth- 
ing for the famishing and ill-clad troops were to be procured 
only by impressment ; and the inability of the Government from 
the want of means to carry on the war, was openly admitted. 

British posts were established and garrisons kept up at nu- 
merous points in the very heart of the Southern country, and 
detachments from the main British army were with profane im- 
pudence rioting through the land in an uninterrupted career of 



ADDRESS — J. G. M. RAMSEY. 553 

outrage, aggression and conquest. Uncler the protection of 
these, the Tories were encouraged to rise against their Whi^ 
countrymen, to depredate upon then- property, insult their fam- 
ilies, seek their lives and drive them into exile upon the Western 
wastes. This was the general condition of American affairs in 
the South immediately after the defeat near Camden. Gen. 
Gates, endeavoring to collect together the shattered fragments 
of his routed army, made a short halt at Charlotte. He after- 
wards feU back further, and made his headquarters at Hills- 
boro'. 

Lord Cornwallis, on the 8th of September, marched towards 
North Carolina, and as he passed through the most hostile and 
populous Whig districts he sent Tarleton and Ferguson to scour 
the country to his right and left. Arrived at Charlotte, and 
considering it to be a favorable situation for further advances, 
his lordship made preparation for estabhshing a post at that 
place. While he was thus engaged, the commanders of his de- 
tachments were proceeding in their respective expeditions. 
That of Col. Ferguson, as has been already seen, was for sev- 
eral weeks on his left, watching the movements of McDowell, 
Sevier, Shelby, Williams and Clarke. His second in command, 
Dupoister, had followed the mountain men in close pursuit as 
they retired, after the victory at Enoree, to their mountain 
fastnesses. 

Ferguson himself, with the main body of his army, followed 
close upon the heels of Dupoister, determined to retake the 
prisoners or support him if he should overtake and engage the 
escaping enemy. Finding that his efforts were fruitless, Fergu- 
son took post at Gilbertown, near the present Rutherfordton, 
in North Carolina. From this place he sent a most threaten- 
ing message, by a paroled prisoner, that if the officers west of 
the mountains did not lay down their opposition to the British 
arms he would march his army over, burn and lay waste their 
country and hang their leaders. " The pursuit by Ferguson of 
the retiring Americans brought, him so far to the left as to seem 
to threaten the habitations of the hardy race that occupied and 
lived beyond the mountains. He was approaching the lair of 
the lion, for many of the families of the persecuted Whigs had 
been deposited in this asylum." 



55-t OUB NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

The refugee Whigs received a hearty welcome from their hos- 
pitable but plain countrymen on Watauga and Nollachucky. 
The door of every cabin was thrown open and the strangers felt 
at once assured of kindness, sympathy and assistance. Among 
the neighbors of Sevier and Shelby the exiles from the Caro- 
linas and Georgia were at home. 

Iu this march of the riflemen to the sea we hear of no appro- 
priation of private property, no incendiarism, no robbery, no insult 
to non-combatants. To the honor of the troops under Sevier 
and Shelby, their integrity was as little impeached as their valor. 
They came back to their distant homes enriched by no spoils, 
stained with no dishonor ; enriched only by an imperishable 
fame, an undying renown, andf an unquestionable claim to the 
admiration and gratitude of their countrymen and of posterity- 
The results of the campaigns of 1780 and 1781 sensibly affected 
the measures of the British Ministry, and rendered the American 
war unpopular in Great Britain, and on the 19th of April, 1783, 
peace was proclaimed in the American army by the Commander- 
in-chief, George Washington, precisely eight years from the first 
effusion of blood at Lexington. For more than that length of 
time the pioneers of Tenuessee had been in incessant war. On 
the 10th of October, 1774, their youthful heroes, Shelby and 
Sevier, flashed their maiden swords at the battle of Keukawa, 
and with little intermission thereafter were constantly engaged 
in guarding the settlements or attacking and invading the savage 
enemy. The gallant and patriotic participation of the mountain 
men in the 1\ evolutionary struggle under the same men, now 
become leaders, has been just related. We embalm their memory 
and their heroic services ; we bow down and do homage to their 
patriotism and to the majesty of their virtue. It is through 
them that on this centennial anniversary Tennessee claims an 
identity with the American Revolution and American independ- 
ence. And to the Historical Society of our proud State, to the 
posterity of its pioneer soldiery and to their successors, I beg 
leave to add the injunction : 

" Let no mean hope yonr souls enslave, 
Be independent, generous, brave, 
Your fathers such example gave 
And such revere 1" 



HISTORICAL ADDRESS, 

BY HON. W. T. AVERY. 

DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION AT MEMPHIS, TENN. 
JULY 4th, 187G. 

My Fellow Countrymen and Country-Women, composing this 
vast concourse of people — In approaching the performance of 
the duty which has been assigned me to-day, I do so distrust- 
ing in no slight degree my ability to fulfill in a manner befit- 
ting the magnitude and importance of the occasion. 

And it is a pleasing thought that to-day, at this hour, 
thn mghout the length and breadth of the land, everywhere in 
this great Republic of ours on this, our centennial day, this 
patriotic duty is being performed. So, then, my fellow-citizens 
of the county of Shelby, you will please be content with the 
plain recital of such facts and incidents connected with the 
early history of our county and our city, and the mention of 
those revered names closely identified with their foundation, as 
I shall be able crudely and imperfectly to group together in the 
brief space of time it will be proper to employ in the presenta- 
tion of them ; I hope, too, it will be borne in mind that in the 
short time allotted it will be impossible to embrace in this 
sketch many, very many of the names and incidents it would be 
both pleasing and profitable to record. The great difficulty 
which confronts me at the threshold is not the paucity of 
material, but from the varied historical facts, incidents and 
names which crowd upon the memory of your historian which 
to select and which to discard. I wish it was possible that the 
early history of every name connected with the first settlement 
of our county and our town could find a place in this imperfect 
record ; knowing most of them personally as I did, it would be 
a labor of love to embalm their memories in historic page. But 
this cannot be done. To my task then. The spot we inhabit 
to-day is rich in the history of the past. It was upon these 
bluffs that more than three hundred years ago, not fifty years, 



556 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

after that great navigator, Columbus, had lifted from the seas 
a hidden continent and held out to view a new and undiscov- 
ered world ; that that wonderful but ill-fated Spaniard, Her- 
nando DeSoto, discovered our great river and with the crucifix 
in one hand and the sword in the other, planted upon its savage 
banks the Christian cross. A little below our city still stand, 
despite the effacing fingers of time, the remains of the mounds 
of Cbisca, which history tells us is the name of the village which 
DeSoto founded upon reaching the river. A little more than 
one hundred years thereafter, Father Marquette, a missionary, 
together with an explorer named Joliette, descended the Mis- 
sissippi in canoes, and from the maps and charts accompanying 
the history of their explorations, evidently camped for a season 
upon these bluffs, as they passed along. A few years there- 
after a French explorer named La Sahe, under a commission 
from his Government to " perfect the discovery of the Mis- 
sissippi," built a fort and established the arms of France upon 
the 4th Chickasaw Bluff. In 1739, Bienville, third Governor of 
Louisiana, and founder of New Orleans, in his campaign against 
the Chickasaws, established fort Assumption, and remained the 
winter here. In 1782 General Gayosco, from whom thebayouthat 
runs up stream through our city, from its southern to its north- 
ern limits, takes its name, by authority of the Spanish Govern- 
ment occupied the bluff, and at the mouth of Wolf river estab- 
lished Fort Fernandina. In 1803 General, Pike took pos- 
session of the fort and planted the stars and stripes in place of 
of the Spanish flag. Some time thereafter General Wilkerson 
dismantled this fort and established Fort Pickering which stood 
down near the Jackson Mounds long after my remembrance, 
and I have often seen boys with their pocket knives picking out 
the bullets embedded in the timbers of the old block houses of 
the foit. Shelby county was named in honor of Isaac Shelby, 
the first Governor of Kentucky, and who, by the side of Sevier, 
distinguished himself at the battle of King's Mountain. In 
1 818, together with General Jackson, he negotiated upon this 
bluff an advantageous treaty with the Chickasaws, by which 
were ceded to the United States all the lands in West Ten- 
nessee, then known as the Chickasaw purchase. 



ADDRESS W. T. AVEKY. 557 

My countrymen, although not covetous of being considered 
an old man, I have myself seen the red man of the forest, whose 
primeval home was not a half day's journey on horseback from 
where we now stand, pushed away across the great river, over 
to the wilderness of the west, and the native wilds he then in- 
habited, peopled by a hardy, intelligent and enterprising popu- 
lation. Flourishing towns and young cities, marts of commerce 
and centers of civilization and refinement now adorn the places 
where savage huts then stood. I have personally known every 
chief magistrate Memphis has ever had (save those appointed 
by military authority during the war), from Winchester, the first, 
down to his Honor Judge Flippin, who is helping us celebrate 
here to-day. I have seen every stately structure that now stands 
between Pinch and Pickering rise from the earth in their ma- 
jesty and beauty, monuments, as they are, to the skill, enterprise, 
energy and public spirit of such citizens as Lemuel Austin, the 
Saffarans, Charley Jones, the lamented Greenlaws, and many 
others I might mention, who builded up this young city of 
ours. 

And now, having, in a feeble and imperfect manner, presented 
some of the leading historical features connected with the founda- 
tion of our county and our city, and made honorable mention of 
such names as I could bring to memory connected therewith, 
may we not be pardoned if we pause for a moment on the top 
of this Centennial Pisgah where we stand to-day, and taking a 
more extended range of vision, view our promised land. Look 
at it as it stands mapped out before us and before the world to- 
day ! From thirteen sparsely populated colonies, with three 
millions of people, this Centennial day dawned on thirty-eight 
independent States, some of them young empires in themselves, 
with forty millions of population. But a little while ago, long 
within the memory of many who hear me to-day, the star of 
our empire had scarcely peeped over the blue heights of the 
Alleghanies in the east. This star, still westward taking its 
onward way, has gone on, and on, until it has shot across a con- 
tinent, and to-day shines its glittering sheen in the placid waters 
of the golden shored Pacific. May we not be pardoned, then, 
in indulging in a little patriotic gush upon this occasion, espe- 



558 OUK NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

cially when We contemplate our wonderful advancement as a 
people and as a nation, in arts, in arms, in science, in agriculture 
and the mechanic arts, in inventions and discoveries, in com- 
merce and navigation, and in internal improvements, with our 
seventy-three thousand miles of railroads ramifying every por- 
tion of the Republic ; in everything that goes to make up the 
greatness and power of a people and a nation. In attestation 
of which may we not proudly point to the great Centennial Ex- 
position now spread out in grand review within sound of the old 
Liberty Bell which one hundred years ago to-day first pealed 
out its proclamation to the world that a new nation had been 
born to liberty that day. I say, may we not point with a little 
exultant pride to the fact that to-day in the front rank of hon- 
orable competition with all the most favored and enlightened 
nations of the earth, both great and small, the American States 
are exhibiting all these industrial and material evidences of 
wonderful advancement. The Great Pacific Railway, too, 
stretching from ocean to ocean, tying these States together as 
with bands of steel. The North united to the South by those 
natural channels of commerce, the great livers of the land, and 
the East bound to the West by those other and artificial iron 
bonds of perpetual union ; this nation is designed as the God 
of Nature and of Nations too, decreed it ever should be, now and 
forever, one and inseparable. 

To the American mind is the civilized world indebted for the 
two great inventions of this or any other age. It was a Fulton 
who iirst harnessed steam and drove it to the cars of commerce 
and to the floating fleets of navigation. In all the rivers of the 
earth, and in all the seas wherever the flag of commerce floats, 
and the light of civilization shines, every revolution of the mighty 
wheels that move the steam monarehs of the deep, and the lesser 
vessels upon the thousand rivers, both great and small, and 
every puff of steam that is sent forth from the countless scape 
pipes, proclaim in thunder tones the genius of a Fulton. Every 
electric click that flashes upon the thousand wires its myriad 
messages over the lands and under the seas, throughout the 
world and around the globe proclaim forever to all peoples the 
genius, and perpetuate the memory of the immortal Morse. 

Did any people who have ever lived since creation's dawn and 
since the morning stars first sang together, have so great cause 
to be proud of their country and its achievements. 

The Frenchman when he seeks a home amongst us still loves 
best the vine-clad hills of France. 

The Italian, though true and steadfast to his adopted coun- 
try, each year must renew his vows of love to the land of Colum- 
bus. The Englishman, full of the glories of his sea-girt isle, in 



ADDRESS W. T. AVERT. 5.") 9 

full, too, of the thought that she is mistress of the seas aud that 
" Britania rules the waves." The German, coming as he does 
from the home and birth-place of learning and of science, each 
returning Mai-Fest rekindles afresh unfading memories of bis 
Fatherland. Who can chide tbe rugged son of grand old Scotia 
for cherishing in his heart of hearts a filial devotion to the land 
of Bruce and of Burns, of Wallace and of Walter Scott ? The 
Irishman too, eager, as he ever is, to enlist in the wars and fight 
the battles of his adopted country, never can forget his green 
isle of the ocean, his shamrock and his shillallah ; and every St. 
Patrick's Day in the Morning pours out anew the offerings of 
his heart upon the altar of his native land. All people of all 
nations who seek an asylum in our midst, though born to a new 
liberty, and awakened to a new citizenslrip and baptised in a 
new dispensation, never banish from their recollection the 
memories of the land that gave them birth. Oh, may we not be 
pardoned to-day — this hundredth anniversary of our nation's 
birth — for enkindling afresh upon the altars of our hearts the 
fires of patriotism and love to " our own, our native land." 

Our foreign-born brethren of every clime and of every kin- 
dred join with us everywhere in one universal chorus of devo- 
tion to this great heritage, the land of our nativity and of their 
adoption. And in the eloquent language of another : " This 
glorious land of ours that blooms between the seas, from the 
northern border of it where God's perpetual bow of peace glori- 
fies Niagara's cliffs to the sea-girt southern line, where God's 
gifts make earth almost an Eden of fragrance and beauty ; and 
from the rock bound Atlantic, where the eastern song of the sea 
begins its morning music, to the far off Pacific, where the west- 
ern waters murmur their benediction to our land as the tide 
goes out beneath the setting sun ; everywhere we feel the inspi- 
ration of our country and devoutly pray God bless our native 
land." 

This Fourth of July is a common heritage ; it belongs to no 
North, no South, no East, no West. Men of the South as well 
as men of the North aided in establishing this empire of 
freedom. It is the united work of both. 

The South gave to the country him who wrote the charter of 
our liberties. The South gave to the world a Washington. Let 
the names of Washington and Jefferson be indissolubly and for- 
ever linked with those of Hancock, Adams, Franklin. We of 
the South have an undying glory in our nation's birthright. The 
great principles that underlie the foundation of our Govern- 
ment, enunciated by the Fathers of the Republic, established by 
their swords and cemented by their blood ; those great doctrines 
of civil liberty and human government, set forth in the unequal* 



5 00 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

ed instrument which has been read to-day, are as dear to the 
South as to the North, and to the North as to the South. 
They are the great bulwarks upon which we rest as the sheet 
anchor of our liberties, as a people, and our perpetuity as a 
government. And now a little about brotherly love. Long be- 
fore the political differences between the North and the South 
had culminated in a calamitious war , the same disturbing ele- 
ment, that Iliad of our woes, now no more, that divided us po- 
litically had cleft in twain the churches of the living God. 

That great popular organization, the Methodist Church, for 
more than thirty years has been divided into two distinct and 
separate governments, North and South. Thank God this Cen- 
tennial year will see them again united. Listen to the eloquent 
and patriotic language of Dr. Duncan, President of Randolph 
Macon College, who was sent, together with the venerable Lo- 
vick Pierce and Dr. Garland, Chancellor of Vanderbilt Univer- 
sity, as a fraternal messenger of peace and unity to the Metho- 
dist Church North, recently assembled in solemn conference in 
the City of Baltimore. In speaking of " brotherly love," here 
is what he says to his brethren of the North : " With this in- 
spiration in our hearts, and with this cry upon our lips we tear 
down all hostile barriers, we trample under foot every obstacle 
to brotherly love ; we consign bitterness and strife to oblivion ; 
we crush the serpent of discord with our heel, and unite anew 
all the vast army of American Methodists in one celestial shout." 
This is the language of a broken brotherhood, the one to the 
other. Cannot, then, the political and geographical sections — 
the broken brotherhood — of this Great Republic, severed as they 
have been in deadly hostility, but now once more united ; since 
the rainbow of peace now spans the continent ; under the me- 
ridian splendors of this Centennial sun, adopt the fervid and 
patriotic language of the inspired spirit of this peace maker of 
God and the Gospel ? Can we not agree, North and South, to wipe 
out forever Mason's and Dixon's line ; tear down all hostile bar- 
riers ; trample under foot every obstacle to brotherly kindness ; 
consign bitterness and strife to oblivion ; crush out the serpent 
of discord with our undivided and united heel, and unite anew 
all the vast army of forty millions of freemen in one Centennial 
shout : 

" United in lakes, united in lands, 

With bonds no dissensions can sever) 
United in hearts, united in hands — 
The flag of our Union forever 1 " 



THE GLOEIOTJS EPOCH. 

AN ORATION BY HON. B. K. ELLIOTT, 

delivered at the centennial celebration, at indianapolis, ind., 
july 4th, 1876. 

My Countrymen : Other nations and other people celebrate 
the anniversaries of great events, but Americans only of all the 
nations of the world celebrate that which commemorates the 
birth of national freedom and the security of the right of self- 
government. A nation of freemen greet this day. This day, of 
all the marked and memorable days in the calendar of time 
alone presents the great spectacle of freemen gathering to- 
gether to celebrate the anniversary of their liberty and of their 
national existence. The prophetic words of one of the great 
men of one hundred years ago have for a century been fulfilled; 
for one hundred years " this day haw been kept as the great an- 
niversary of the nation." But it is more than the anniversary 
of our national existence and of American freedom; it is the 
anniversary of the birth of civil and religious liberty. It marks 
an epoch — and a glorious one — in the history of all mankind. 
The tones of the bell which a hundred years ago rang out pro- 
claiming " liberty throughout all the land to all the inhabitants 
thereof " swept across the Atlantic, from the new world to the 
old, awakening there a slumbering spirit yet to be kindled into 
brighter and more constant glow. All Europe felt the influ- 
ence, England profited by the lesson of the Revolution, and 
there now no laws crush religious liberty and no Puritan or 
Pilgrim flees from persecution. All the countries of Europe 
have been benefited by the influence of American liberty ; even 
Kussia, despotic Russia, has been touched by the influence " of 
this so potent spell." 

All mankind have an interest in the event which this day and 
this vast assembly commemorate. The subhme principles which 
found form in the immortal instrument just read, affect not only 



562 



OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 



one nation or one race, but all nations and all races. That de- 
claration gave cause for rejoicing to many nations, and it shall 
be a source of good to generations yet unborn. Its influence 
is not confined to one country, it extends to all countries; its 
influence is not narrowed to one age, it will reach all ages. Well 
may the great body of the people of all nations join with us in 
this day's rejoicing. And many do. Many voices and many 
hearts in other lands than ours give this day glad and grateful 
greeting. 

One hundred years of civil and religious liberty. Exalting 
reflection ! For a century an independent nation; for one hun- 
dred years a free people. America presents this day to the 
world a people who, for a century, have exercised the right of 
self-government. Prosperous and progressive has been the ca- 
reer of our Republic under the government of the people by 
the people. Among all the nations of the world no parallel can 
be found. In liberty excelling all, in prosperity advancing more 
rapidly, in enlightenment and civilization in its noblest form, 
surpassing all. Republics in name there have been, but repub- 
lics in little else but name. Unlike all others, ours has been and 
is a republic in substance and reality. Our people are free in 
matters of religion and conscience, free in matters of govern- 
ment. Not, indeed, the absolute liberty which lives in unlicen- 
sed passions or unrestrained desires, and dies in anarchy, but 
liberty regulated and jDrotected by law. Protected and secured 
by laws originating not with law-makers claiming the preroga- 
tive because of the accident of birth, but by laws established by 
themselves. 

Ours is that firm form of liberty, liberty sesured by law, which 
alone is worth the high estate of free-born men. 

A mighty people with grateful hearts rise up to welcome this 
day ; a people coming from many lands and representing many 
nationalities. This day joining in one purpose, uniting in one 
common cause are men " native here and to the manor born, and 
men from the blood of warring Europe sprung." Diverse in 
creeds, various in nationalities, but united in one thought, the 
love of liberty, and breathing one prayer, that for the perpetuity 
of our government. This day joins in one common bond with 



ORATIOX — B. K. ELLIOTT. 5(\'o 

us men from Germany — land of great-minded, big-sotiled men ; 
from Ireland — " famous in poetry and in song ; " from France, 
land of the generous and the brave. Ah, France! Franco! 
name ever dear to Americans ! Ally, benefactor arid friend in 
the dark hours of the direst distress ! "Welcome to our shores 
and to our hearts, ye sons of our ancient allies. The memories 
of the days when the illustrious of your land joined arms with 
the noble of ours, live in the hearts of the Frenchmen of the 
present. "We behold the evidence in the pageant you have pre- 
sented in honor of this day. Lafayette ! Rochambeau ! How 
closely are these glorious names interwoven with the loved and 
honored of our own land. Linked with the beloved of our own 
country their memories shall never perish while American lib- 
erty endures The men of Europe who come to the Western 
World, moved by the desire for freedom, and impressed with 
the importance of the preservation of our government, shall find 
a hearty welcome and happy homes. Hail, all hail, ye seekers 
of liberty ! The purpose which animates those who seek our 
shores is a noble one, and they are true men— 

"Men, my brothers, men, the workers, ever reaping something new; 
Tet I doubt not through the ages one increasing purpose runs, 
And the thoughts of men aie widened with the process of the suns." 

Freemen salute this day and honor its associations with feel- 
ings of lofty pride and heartfelt gratitude. Proud of our country 
and her institutions, grateful to the God of nations, and to the 
men who were His instruments in securing the great blessings 
which are our most glorious heritage, the voices of all good men 
should, even as the voices of many waters, blend in anthems of 
thanksgiving and praise. It is just, it is eminently jnst, that 
we this day render grateful tribute and sincere homage to the 
memories of the great men of the early years of the historic 
century just closed. Men pure, brave, just men, always 

" God's most potent instruments 
In working out pure intents." 

Other nations have owed their origin to love of war, to am- 
bition, and to thirst for power. Other nations have been founded 
to advance the fortunes of military chieftains, or to promote the 



504 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

desire of selfish ambition. Ours alone owes its birth to a pure 
and exulted spirit of liberty. No unhallowed, no sordid, no de- 
basing influences were present at the creation of our nation. 
The spirit of liberty crossed the Atlantic with the Pilgrim 
fathers ; it was nurtured by pure and lofty hearts in the wilder- 
ness of the new and then almost unknown world. It grew with 
the country's increasing years ; and of that spirit was the noble 
form of American government conceived and born. God fa- 
vored America. 

How chaste, how pure the source from which your great Re- 
public springs. The men of this generation — the men of ail 
coming time — will realize the truth of the Puritan preacher's 
utterance made more than two hundred years ago, that " God 
sifted a whole nation that he might send a choice grain over 
into this wilderness." Little did the humble preacher of Dor- 
chester dream of the vast, the immense harvests of which that 
grain contained the germ. The germ of liberty found congenial 
soil upon the rocky and sterile coast of New England. They 
wiio came flying from Britain's shore brought with them the 
spirit which found broad domain in the vast extent of the new 
world, and where, by the blessing of God, it shall ever remain, 
pervading, animating, and vivifying a mighty people. 

For more than one hundred years the colonists, retaining 
their religious liberty, yet rendered loyal allegiance to the 
mother country ; throughout all these years, however, cherish- 
ing and fostering the spirit of liberty, " eternal spirit of the 
chainless mind." 

At length, in the fullness of time, came the men of 1776, 
heroes in courage, sages in wisdom, ; in their lives and char- 
acters pure and stainless. Illustrious men ! Nations of the 
old world have had their chieftains, their leaders, their phil- 
osophers eminent in wisdom and brave in action, but only 
America has had chieftains and leaders who to all other virtues 
added pure and incorruptible patriotism, untainted by self- 
interest and untarnished by sordid ambition. 

In honoring this day we honor the founders of our Republic; 
not alone our Nation's benefactors, but benefactors of all man- 
kind. " The whole earth is the sepulchre of illustrious men," 



OKATION — B. K. ELLIOTT. 5G5 

was said of old. The whole earth is the tomb of America's 
illustrious dead, and their monuments the grateful remem- 
brance of men which shall perish only with the death of time. 
Often and often have the words of praise been spoken of the 
founders of the Republic, and I but repeat what has many, 
many times been better said. But it is fit that we this day 
think and speak of the patriot sages and soldiers heroes of the 
Revolution. It would be b'ase ingratitude to omit to speak of 
them. Let this day, and every recurring anniversary of our in- 
dependence, find their names and deeds fresh and strong in 
the memory and gratitude of our people. It is just, it is fitting 
that throughout all the years of our coming history, as often 
as the anniversary of our independence shall recur, words of 
praise should be spoken of those who gave to us the day we 
celebrate and the cause for our rejoicing. Not, indeed, that 
eulogy is needed, not that ; not that, for each advancing step 
of time shall add new luster to their names. Each step in 
man's elevation shall freshen and make more sacred their 
memories. 

" The past, with all its glories, its elevating and ennobling 
memories, is secure." A stable, a beneficent and a free gov- 
ernment, is ours. The future concerns xis most. Narrow, in- 
deed, the mind, selfish and dead the heart that cares not for 
future. Vain and fruitless the struggles and sufferings of the 
brave men who gave up home, comfort and lives for their 
country, if advancing generations shall be careless of their 
country's future. 

A vast domain is ours. Greater, grander or fairer the sun in 
all his rounds looks not down upon. Never to man was given 
a territory so great as ours, never upon a nation were nature's 
gifts so lavishly bestowed. The wealth of earth rewards the 
labor of the miner, the fertile soil and genial climate give to the 
tiller of the soil bounteous reward, the waters of rushing streams 
furnish power to the ponderous wheels of our great manufacto- 
ries, the immense fields of fuel, the uncounted acres of coal will 
supply for myriads of ages the wants of the steam engine, that 
mighty agency of progress. Our broad and deep rivers bear our 
products to the ocean, and the sails of our ships, whitening the 



160 



OUR NATIONAL JUBILEK. 



waters of all seas, carry tliem to every quarter of the globe. All 
that man could wish or nature give is ours. These things, great 
as they are, will avail us nothing without a strong, a stable, and 
a free government. 

It is much the fashion to vaunt our Anglo-Saxon race and to 
praise our climate and our country as liberty-inspiring, and it 
is true that our race is one well calculated to promote and foster 
republican institutions. There are those who loudly proclaiuT^ 
that our land and our race make for us a destiny, and that des- 
tiny is always to be that of freedom. Let us not be deceived. 
Race, climate and country of themselves neither make nor pre- 
serve the liberties of nations. The people themselves do this. 
The influence of country, climate and race may aid, but they 
only aid. On each man, every man, depends in some measure 
the perpetuity of our free government. There is no destiny for 
men or nations, save that which they achieve for themselves. 
There may be fortunate accidents, but how foolish the man who 
grounds his hopes of success upon the fortunes of chance. 

Firm adherence to just principles and conscientious discharge 
of the duties of free citizenship will give, and this only can give, 
to our Republic that destiny which lies within our grasp. Where 
laws are made and institutions moulded by hereditary rulers 
men may be passive and silent, but where, as in our Republic, 
citizens are themselves law makers and institution framers, 
their silence is dangerous, their inaction death. 

Thought, reflection, care and activity are the burdens which 
citizens must bear who would make sure of the reward of free- 
and prosperous government. The burdens as conrpared with 
the rewards is as nothing. 

On this great day which marks the opening of the second 
century of civil and religious liberty, it is the duty of all free- 
men to pledge themselves anew to their cause and their country. 
That turning to the past, to the lives of those who made this 
day the most memorable of history, we may say 

" Grow great by their example and put on 
The dauntless spirit of resolution." 

Let not the sun which shall rise a century hence cast its beams 



ORATION B. K. ELLIOTT. 567 

upon a generation which shall find our institutions less pure, 
less strong, less free than we this day receive them. 

If this should be so, then we of the present have not " deserved 
well of the Republic." We shall but illy have deserved the 
blessings of this day if we are content to heed only the present 
and look not to the future. There is something more de- 
manded of us this day thau gratitude aud joy; it is required at 
our hands that we look to the dangers of the future ; that we 
resolve to know our full duty, and to "quit ourselves like men" 
in its performance. It is our high duty on this day of jubilee 
to give grave thought to the dangers which menace all repre- 
sentative governments. It is the part of prudence aud wisdom 
to look in advance, and not rush upon dangers unawares. If 
it be known from what quarter danger is to be expected, ef- 
fective measures for defense can be taken. The chart of the 
mariner gives information which enables him to escape danger- 
ous rocks and shoals, and the lessons of history and the teach- 
ings of experience yield such information as will enable the 
citizens of a free country to avert the dangers which lie iu their 
future. 

What, then, fellow-citizens, are the dangers to which our 
system of government is exposed ? No subject can be more 
worthy of careful consideration, more deserving of solemn and 
earnest thought. From what quarter will these dangers come, 
and in what form and guise ? 

From foreign invasion we have less, far less, to fear than 
governments less free. Free people are ever brave, and as 
against foreign foes always invincible. Against such dangers 
would Hash 

"Millions of flaming swords." 

If ruin shall ever come — which God avert— it will come from 
internal causes — from ourselves. Factious party spirit may 
bring dangers, masses acting in concert and in great organiza- 
tions will do things from which most of its own members 
would shrink with horror. The individual oonscience and will 
are lost or weakened in the crowd of minds, just as an indi- 
vidual becomes indistinguishable in a great throng of persons. 
Party pride and partisan enmities often overcome considera- 



568 



OOK NATIONAL JUBILEE. 



tions of a higher character. Led by strong party attachment, 
influenced by hatred of j)arty opponents, men have done dan- 
gerous and evil things. Blind, unreasoning obedience to party 
and party leaders is perilous, and mad partisan zeal a danger- 
ous thing. 

Parties are essential to the existence of a free government. 
The danger is not because there are parties, but because men 
lose their individuality in party. Parties are not an evil, but a 
good. The evil is not that men will act with parties, but that 
men care only for party success, even though it comes at the 
expense of the general good. The desire for party success and 
the punishment of party enemies at every hazard has been one 
of the distinctive evils in the history of all nations where oppos- 
ing parties have existed. Men are too apt to surrender their 
own judgments into the keeping of party leaders, and party 
leaders too often care only to advance their own personal affairs, 
or to gratify their own ambition. 

Danger from party there can never be if men will be tolerant; 
if the parties are founded on great principles and the individual 
members will think and reason for themselves. He who does not 
do this, but blindly and unthinkingly yields to party behests, even 
though he lives in a free government, is not a free man. Parties 
there must ever — and ought ever — be in a free government. 
Nothing could be more disastrous than that the affairs of gov- 
ernment would not be agitated, that they should stagnate. It is 
well that there is conflict of opinion, and that therefore parties 
espouse conflicting views, else there would be no such thing as 
progression. Xo it is to be esteemed a reproach that a citizen 
attaches himself to a party. If he did not he would be of little 
service in public affairs. Acting alone he could accomplish no- 
thing. It is indeed, the duty of every citizen to interest him- 
self in the affairs of government, and if need be, act witt the 
party organization. If such there be, which will, in his own 
judgment; best advance the welfare of the country. 

There should be times when citizens should forget party and 
be active for the preservation of the integrity of the counh'y and 
prompt to repel dangers. There should be days, and this is one 
of tb.erp. when party ties should be shaken off and all should 



ORATION — B. K. ELLIOTT. 569 

come together as united freemen, sinking all other considera- 
tions in the harmonious devotion to the whole country. To-day 
Ave are no party men, to day we are not of different nationali- 
ties, we are all, all Americans. 

Republics as well as monarchies may be governed too much. 
Legislation cannot remedy all evils. Too much legislation may 
bring danger, serious danger. Public matters only are fit sub- 
jects for public legislation. That which concerns private classes 
or private interests alone should never be the subject of public 
legislation. If it should become so the temptation which would 
environ legislators would multiply to a frightful extent, for 
favoritism, unjust discrimination, and corruption would prevail. 
It is vain to look to legislation as a panacea for all troubles. 
Over government tends to tyrranny, and there may be tyrranny 
in republics as well as in monarchies. General legislation can 
never take the place of family and domestic government, it can 
never make a great people. Education, training, instruction in 
homes, schools and churches are far more potent for good than 
legislation can possibly be. 

When offices become temptations, then dangers will ensue 
from the machinations of placemen. The pay for official ser- 
vices should be such as shall justly compensate, but, not make 
rich. The salaries should be fixed and certain, without any con- 
tingent perquisites ; the position should be shorn of all oppor- 
tunities for speculation. The duties should be certain and plain- 
ly defined. If temptations are taken from official paths, then 
shall " saint-seducing gold" have less influence on our elections, 
and we shall have a purer administration of affairs. Offices 
should be desired not because they are profitable, but because 
they are honorable. 

Pure elections, free from all corrupting influences, are of ut- 
most importance. The fountain of power is the ballot, and the 
source should be pure, for if it be not that which flows from it 
will be evil and impure. Rigid laws well enforced and small 
polls will secure pure elections ; and then indeed shall we have 

" The freeman casting with unpurchased hand 
The vote that shakes the turrets of the land." 

The purity of the ballot is of the first importance, and the 



570 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

things which endanger it are those against winch all should 
combine. The purity of the ballot is above all party considera- 
tions, and can never, while there is honor in man, be justly 
made a party question. 

The current of public opinion moves and controls the ma- 
chinery of government, If that machinery moves properly and 
efficiently the current must be steady and strung ; if it be slug- 
gish and inefficient, the wheels stop ; if it be violent and tur- 
bulent, the machinery is destroyed. After all, then, the chief 
danger is from the people themselves. If they are apathetic, 
the machinery will have no strength ; if they are turbulent, the 
machinery will be destroyed with violence. The question of 
government at last comes home to men's business and bosoms. 
Its greatest danger is there. The considerations I have sug- 
gested lead to a wide field of thought, but time admonishes that 
into it I must no further go. 

Safety is in the people. The people, after calm consideration, 
are always safe. The evil is, that they do not always reflect. 
No premeditated crime was ever committed by an intelligent 
people ; no great body of enlightened citizens ever united in a 
base and cowardly act. The monstrous atrocities of the French 
revolution were not the acts of the people, but of a faction of a 
few hundred out of many millions. 

Enlightened and thoughtful citizens perpetuate representa- 
tive governments, and although danger may come, though perils 
may threaten against a vigilant and enlightened people, they 
will never prevail. For a full century the power of the people 
has preserved our Constitution through many dangers. The 
times are more favorable, the people better fitted for self-gov- 
ernment , than they were a century ago. 

We are the ancients of the earth ; not those who lived thous- 
ands of years ago. The world is older, not younger. The 
human race has grown older, and the men of to-day are of a 
more ancient race than those who lived in the early days of 
creation. The history of the race, full of lessons of deep import 
and of solemn warning, is open to us. The errors of the past 
we can see and avoid. Unlike the republics of early ages, we 
have for our guidance the history of those which have risen and 



ORATION— B. K. ELLIOTT. 571 

fallen. The sun of civilization is now towards its highest point* 
and is advancing higher and higher. The greater the civilizu 
tion the more widely knowledge is diffused, the more sure and 
strong republican governments become. The wiser and better 
the people grow, the wiser and better shall be democratic gov- 
ernment. Each succeeding day dawns upon a more elevated 
civilization, which adds permanency to free government. Before 
the advancing, all-potent force of civilization, superstition and 
ignorance fall, and more nearly does man approach perfection 
and become better fitted for self-government. 

As long as civilization shaU advance, so long shall a represen- 
tative government grow in strength and usefulness. The prom- 
ise is bright, the dangers lessen as enlightenment and wisdom 
prevail. The tendency of civilization is onward; there are no 
indications of halting, no evidences of retrogression. Never 
since the historic period was civilization so great or knowledge 
so general as now. Never since the world began was the on- 
ward stride so sure, so steady, and so rapid. The future shad- 
ows success to free government, and gives strong promise of 
the universal spread of free institutions. We have just reason 
for high hope. The superstitions which enthralled are fast fall- 
ing, the bigotry and intolerance which enchained are growing 
weaker, and the ignorance which darkened and crushed free 
thought has been conquered. 

That republics in earlier and ruder ages have fallen does n< it 
prove that ours, too, shall fall. The times are vastly changed; 
men are greatly different. The useful arts engage the attention 
of men. G reat talents are devoted to the sciences. Great men 
labor to advance the good of their fellow-men. The early re- 
publics existed in ages when war was esteemed the noblest and 
almost the only honorable profession, and when warlike exploits 
only secured power and fame. All this has changed, peaceful 
pursuits confer high honor, labor is honorable, and the arts and 
sciences crown with honor those who succeed in them. Many 
suns have risen since the day of our*independence, and each 
has gone down upon a people older in days, improved in edu- 
cation, and therefore more capable of self -government, 

More than a century ago Virginia — grand old Virginia with 



572 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

all her faults, grand, glorious old Virginia still — spurning the 
mott ), " God save the king," gave to the world the more noble 
one of " God save the liberties of America." Be that our prayer 
forevermore. Be it not the prayer of a discordant and dis- 
united people, but of a united and fraternal people. Moved by 
the grand, holy ; aid hallowing memories which rise from the 
early years of tli3 historic cantury just closed, let ah Americans 
invoke the blessing of God upon our country and her institu- 
tions. Freemen! catch ye the inspiration of the day, join in the 
glad and sounding anthems of praise, swell the mighty 
refrain, unite in the prayer, "God save the liberties of 
America." 



CENTENNIAL ADDEESS. 

BY HON. GEO. W. C. JOHNSTON, MAYOR OF CINCINNATI, 
AT CINCINNATI, OHIO. 

DELIVERED JULY 4th, 1876. 

Ladies and Gentlemen, — More than twenty years have 
elapsed since a general demonstration of this nature has been had 
among us ; but to-day, Cincinnati, ever responsive to patriotic calls, 
moves with one common impulse in celebrating the birthday of the 
Nation. 

Thanks to the managers, the procession of this forenoon has 
been magnificent. 

"We meet in this building, ere its removal, to give place to the 
elegant Springer Music Hall, to further commemorate the deeds of 
the men of 1776, and to make particular mention of those who 
signed that grand Charter of Freedom, the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence. 

They were men of high thoughts and boldness of character. 

Charles Carroll, not to be misunderstood as to identity, added 
after his name, "of Carrollton." 

John Hancock, after signing in his large, bold hand, said, throw- 
ing down the pen : " There it is. I guess John Bull can read that 
without spectacles." 

These men signed not for that day alone, but for all time and 
for all people. 

It is the day we celebrate. 

In this land, dedicated by these men to freedom, the foreign- 
born and the native citizen enjoy equal rights and privileges. 

While the foreign-born retains his early recollections of his first 
home across the seas, and many of the manners and customs there- 
of, he yet unites, heart and soul, in doing honor to this day, with 
those native and to the manner born. 

One hundred years has wrought great changes in the appearance 



574 OUR NATIONAL JUBILKK. 

of this land, but it has not dimmed our love of liberty or hatred of 
oppression. 

The spread of intelligence preserves us. A celebrated divine, 
in an eloquent passage, commending the education of the masses, 
said : 

" "We must educate ; we must educate, or we must perish by our 
own prosperity. If we do not, short will be our race from the cra- 
dle to the grave." 

This spirit survives among us — the evidence of that fact is here. 
If intelligence preserves patriotism and virtue, Cincinnati makes 
her showing in the school children before us. 

We are, therefore, celebrating this day with an intelligent un- 
derstanding of the magnitude of the benefits and blessings we 
enjoy. 



THE PAST CENTURY REVIEWED. 

AN ORATION BY GEN. DURBIN WARD. 

DELIVERED AT EXPOSITION HALL, CINCINNATI, OHIO, JULY 4TH, 1876 

American Independence is one hundred years old. Since the 
morning stars sang together, a century so grand, so crowded with 
events, so full of progress, has not closed its record. As heirs to the 
glory of our ancestors we proudly recall their deeds. From youth 
to age we have looked forward to the consummation of this grand 
event, and our eyes now behold the utmost fruition of our longing. 
Inspired with the memories of the noble past of our history we look 
forward with assured faith to the sublime future of our country. 
Struggling with the emotions of this hour, words are shadows of 
thought, and can but faintly express the burning conceptions of the 
soul. The face, the eye, the whole inspired mien instinct with elo- 
quent silence must supplement the faltering lispings of the tongue. 
But looking upward in humble faith to the Great Father, speech 
and silence are alike worthy of' this solemn occasion. So far as 
words can illustrate this epoch, what can they do more appropriate 
than recall some of the great movements of the past and contem- 
plate, as though it were already here, the grandeur yet in store for 
America. 

In reviewing the past century, an American cannot fail to re- 
member that even the existence of this Continent was made known 
to the Old World by a discovery so sublime in heroic adventure, 
as to make America from the first an object of profound and all- 
pervading interest. The high motives and daring courage which 
settled our shores also inspired respect and wonder, and the hardy 
purity of the colonists in their new home was everywhere the 
theme of praise. But, even after all this, Europe was taken by 
surprise when the Colonies declared their Independence. That the 
government to which the Mother Country had subjected them was 
not, a galling tyranny, though in many respects oppressive, was well 



576 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

known. It was not the cankering chain of political servitude 
against which they rebelled. They made a broader assertion of the 
sacred rights of freedom, and staked their lives and fortunes on 
the wager of battle. An effort to throw off the oppressive rule 
of Great Britain would have won them sympathy. But the 
grand canons of principle they formulated and announced fired 
with enthusiasm the dawning spirit of liberty. The Declaration 
was the voice of one crying in the wilderness: the forerunner of a 
new political era. And, though we have heard the story a thou- 
sand times, it still enthuses the patriot, and may the day never 
come when it does not ! Cold reason may be enough to guide the 
head of the scientific thinker, but the burning flame of a holy pas- 
sion ought to fill and rouse the hearts of the people ! The rising 
generation must glow with the same patriotic ardor that nerved 
their forefathers. 

Behold in the feeble little city of Philadelphia, having a popu- 
lation of a few thousand merchants and artisans, but the metro- 
polis, small as it was, of two millions poor, struggling agriculturists, 
scattered in the wilderness! Behold the immortal Fifty-six, in the 
broad sunlight, uncovered before their only earthly masters, the 
people, with the voice of their authority, " proclaim liberty 
throughout all the land unto all the inhabitants thereof ! " The 
stern countenance of resolve, and the earnest, thundering shouts of 
approval speak a nation into life by the word of their power. 
There stand the great apostles of the people and their cause ; the 
venerable Franklin, who had snatched the lightning from heaven ; 
the youthful Jefferson, whose electric pen was ablaze with the 
lightning of genius ; and there, too, are the courtly Hancock, the 
chivalrous but trembling form of Carroll, and there stands the 
boldest spirit of them all, the impetuous and elocpient Adams, with 
Sherman, and Lee, and Morris, and Livingston, and Wythe, and 
the whole immortal group around him, ready to do or die at their 
country's bidding. It is a scene worthy of the greatest pencil, and 
presents even to the imagination a picture no other event in his- 
tory can surpass. 

Then followed the long and dreary struggle, the hopes and fears, 
the victories and defeats, the patriotism aud treason at home, the 
slow recognition and the generous aid from abroad, the unfaltering, 



ORATION — GEN. DURBIN WARD. 577 

patient, enduring Washington, with his Fabian warfare, his coun- 
try's confidence, and the cabals against him — Green, Gates, Sumter, 
Marion, Putnam, Paul Jones, our heroes at home ; and from 
abroad, Lafayette, Kosciusko, Steuben and DeKalb, rise upon the 
eye till the whole vision is filled with the gorgeous panorama of 
the Revolution. The homely wisdom of Congress, and the devo- 
tion of the people amid all their privations and sufferings, form a 
noble background and have justly gained for them the love and 
admiration of posterity. 

When independence was achieved, the victory was only half 
won. We were free from the yoke of England, but we had no 
constitution of Government. The articles of confederation were 
only a rope of sand, and it was at once apparent that the States 
would soon be " dissevered, discordant, belligerent," unless some 
better organized and permanent system of confederation could be 
devised. Union must be made the palladium of liberty. Patriot- 
ism, fortitude, and courage had conquered for us liberty at the 
point of the sword; it remained for conciliation and wisdom to 
secure it by constitutional guarantees. True, the elemented ideas 
of personal freedom were as old as the common law or the English 
language. We had borrowed much, too, from the recent legislation 
of the mother country. We had the State organizations which 
had kept alive the right of self-government, and afforded a type 
for the general government of the Union. But after all the United 
States, as a Republic, had no fundamental law. The traditions 
of Government had given the mother country an unwritten con 
stitution, but our nation was without traditions of Government. 
Our fathers felt, therefore, that they must establish a written 
constitution, and no less then the serenest wisdom was competent 
to the task. Some of our most thoughtful men were Ministers 
of the Confederation at foreign courts, and their services lost in 
the Federal Convention. Franklin, Adams, Jefferson and Jay 
were abroad, though Franklin and Jay returned in time to give 
efficient aid, the one in the Convention, and the other with his 
potent pen. The remaining great leaders, with Washington at 
their head, convened and framed our present admirable Federal 
Constitution. It was ratified by Conventions of the people in 
the several States, each for itself. No one can read the debates 



578 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

of the several Conventions, or the statesmanlike articles of the 
Federalist without feeling pride in the learning and sagacity of 
the men who laid the foundations of our Government. Faults 
the Constitution may have — and what human production has not; 
but an instrument so wisely balanced as to preserve liberty and 
secure national greatness at the same time over so vast a territory, 
must be the work of no mean hands. And who can doubt that 
it will secure popular rights and national integrity for many ages 
yet to come ? 

It would not be fitting to pass from the Revolutionary period 
to review the whole political history of the country. But we 
may pause to express our gratitude that when the country needed 
the services of men able to rule her destinies they have not been 
wanting. Washington, who led the armies and presided in the 
Federal Convention, lived to inaugurate the new Government 
and leave to future times the noblest example of heroic virtue 
and statemanship, united with social and domestic purity, which 
history affords for the instruction of mankind. It was fortunate, 
too, that the principal actors, if we except Franklin, lived to aid, 
by precept and act, in organizing wisely the Government in all its 
branches under the Constitution they had framed. Its friends 
administered the new Government. The ideas of Madison, Hamil- 
ton, Jefferson, Marshall and the other great spirits found their 
way into laws and financial systems, and judicial decisions, 
until the constitutional foundations of the Government were 
laid deep and strong in the popular affections. And ever since, 
through Webster and Jackson and Lincoln, to say nothing of 
others scarcely less great, when a master hand was needed to 
seize the helm in the storm, it came at the call of the people. 

When the Revolution began the population of the country was 
something less than three millions, and was thinly distributed over 
thirteen Colonies, between the Atlantic and the Alleghanies. This 
population was made up mainly of British and German emigrants 
and their descendants, and of African slaves. But almost all the 
nations of Europe were, to some extent, represented among the 
settlers in the Colonies. The establishment of the new Govern- 
ment gave the country great reputation abroad and prompted 
active emigration to our shores. This emigration would have 



ORATION — GEN. DUItBIN \V.\i;i>. .»7! 

been immensely greater had not the wars of the French Revolution 
engrossed Europe and offered employment to its people, at home, 
while its industries were stunted and crippled by the desolating tread 
of its battling hosts. Finally America was involved, too, and such 
was the waste of population and resources during these long and 
terrible struggles that it was felt on both sides of the Atlantic. 
Population had, however, even during these wars, flowed over tbe 
Alleghanies and reached the Lakes, tbe Gulf, and the Mississippi. 
State after State had been added to tbe Union, and the United 
States bad already come to be recognized among the Powers of 
the earth as the Great Republic. But peace and industry being 
once more restored in Europe, emigrants rushed to our shore by 
millions, until the surging tide of population poured over hill and 
valley, sweeping the wilderness from its path and dotting river and 
Lake shore, savanna and prairie, with cities, villages, mills and 
factories, and covering the broad land with farms and workshops 
till the little sea-girt colonial dependencies have swelled into a 
mighty nation, whose longitude is from the Atlantic to the Pacific, 
and whose bosom beats in pride at the gate of the tropics and on 
the arctic circle. If the Old World had been astonished at the 
success of our war of independence, how much more was it 
astonished at the success of our Republic ! Even the most 
hopeful friends of liberty looked with doubt and misgiving to the 
future. But not the wildest dreamer ever fancied that in one 
hundred years the three millions of poor, scattered colonists would 
be a powerful nation of forty-three millions of freemen, whose 
commercial metropolis should rival the proudest cities of the Old 
World, and whose resources and prosperity should be absolutely 
unrivalled in the world's history ! 

To say that all this great, social and industrial progress is the 
result of our political institutions would be to praise them over- 
much. Proud as we justly are of our form of government, and 
much as it has done to perfect the rights of the citizen and clothe 
him with the free dignity of manhood, our immense success is 
largely due to other causes. A redundant population in Europe, 
belonging to the noblest race of the human family, sought new 
fields of enterprise, and found them in the New World. North 
America, naturally rich in every element of material greatness, 



580 OTJR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

needed but the Briarean hands of European industry to burst into 
all the teeming grandeur of Christian civilization. The liberality 
of our Government and the boundless natural resources of our 
country invited alike to our shores the liberal man of letters and 
the hardy son of toil, and under the protecting aegis of liberty 
of thought and freedom of labor our political and material great- 
ness has been achieved. 

It could hardly have been expected that any people should pass 
at one bound from all the political ideas of an old system into all 
the conceptions of a new one. Nor could it be expected that so 
many nationalities, and two widely diverse races, when planted 
together in a country new to them all, would quietly and harmo- 
niously coalesce into one people. The vestiges of monarchic opin- 
ions lingered under republican institutions, and the old antagonisms 
of nations and races could not but smoulder in the bosom of society. 
Indeed, it is a marvel that the conscious supremacy of law could 
so well hold in check so many elements of discord. It could not 
be done at all, except for the elemental excellence of our constitu- 
tional balance of government, added to the high-toned intelligence 
of our people, and, not least, to the ample scope our wide territory 
gives for rival competing opinions to come into collision without 
engendering Revolutionary frenzy. The strifes of contending po- 
licies, the jealousies of the foreign and native populations, and the 
conflicts of constitutional theories have all been harmonized with- 
out serious disturbance. No internal causes of discord proved too 
strong for peaceful adjustment except that broad divergence of 
social system as old as the civil wars of England and deep-rooted 
as the difference between servile and free labor. Wider and wider 
grew this divergence ; sterner and more intense became this strug- 
gle, until the fires of " the irrepressible conflict " could be quenched 
only in blood. But when that awful day did come, and nothing 
was left but the arbitrament of the sword, the cause of liberty and 
progress, the cause of the Union, found loyal hearts to love and 
strong arms to defend. Again, as of old, the Republic was tri- 
umphant. That system of labor borrowed from the same benighted 
past in which was nurtured the divine right of kings, and which 
was at war equally with the rights of industry and the spirit of 
the age, fell to rise no more forever. And the Union, though it 



ORATION — GEN. DURBIN WARD. 581 

had tottered to its base, as the smoke of the battle drifted away, 
again arose upon the admiring gaze of the world, not a star in its 
flag erased, and its silver bands of equality among all the people, 
and perpetual Union among all the States welded firmer and shin- 
ing brighter from the furnace through which they had passed. 

But nations are not isolated aggregations of men. They are 
members of the same family. Contemporaneously with our Rev- 
olution other events of vast moment were occurring in other coun- 
tries. These events, as well as those in our country, were not spon- 
taneous, but the outgrowth of what had preceded. Omitting to 
dwell upon the influence of ancient ideas, or the examples of an- 
cient nations, or the spirit of old religious systems, several very 
striking occurrences had prepared the way for new political and 
social systems. Feudalism had decayed, and great kingdoms been 
consolidated on its ruins in most parts of Europe. Gunpowder had 
modelled anew the art of war, and the growth of commerce was fast 
putting modern taxation in the place of ancient feudal exactions. 
Luther had crippled the power of ecclesiastical supremacy, and the 
Great Rebellion in England had sapped the foundations of abso- 
lutism while the Revolution of 1688 had made England's crown 
the gift of England's people. In France and Germany the seeds 
of future convulsion had been sown by a powerful school of philos- 
ophers, and although the people as yet lay groaning under the 
weight of aristocratic effeminacy and corruption, the spirit of revolu- 
tion, political, religious and social was everywhere ripe. The two 
continents were acting on each other. The American Revolu- 
tion gave England for the first time a responsible ministry. For 
years Lord North, at the command of the king, defied the will of 
the English people and carried on war against the rebellious 
colonies, after all but the obstinate sovereign saw that their con- 
quest was hopeless and sighed for peace. When public clamor at 
last compelled the resignation of North and the recognition of 
our Independence, the king's supremacy was gone except in name, 
and the premier — made and unmade by the breath of the people — ■ 
became the real sovereign of England. Ministries and policies 
have since yielded to the demand of the governing nation, and in 
a kingdom where once the sovereign, " ruling by the grace of God," 
attainted a member of Parliament, removed a judge or imprisoned 



582 OUIl NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

a jury, at his lawless pleasure, uo being has dared since our 
Revolution to veto the humblest act of Parliament, or retain 
against the popular will the most cherished minister. In France 
the effect of our success was electric. Franklin was half-wor- 
shipped by the French people, and the author of the Declaration of 
Independence witnessed the storming of the Bastile. Old France 
was gone and new France was born in the throes of the stormiest 
revolution that ever drenched a continent in blood. That revolu- 
tion snatched thrones from their hoary base and threw them from 
nation to nation as pawns in the game of conquest. It plucked 
mitres from heads on which sanctity had been laid by infallible 
hands, and played with the holy things of the church as children 
play with baubles. It wrested the suffering people from the grip 
of faithless kings, blase nobles, and irreligious priests. That its 
violence was unreasoning and its vengeance bloodthirsty, no fair- 
minded man can deny. That the long series of wrongs, oppres- 
sions, corruptions and impieties which provoked it were without 
parallel in modern Europe, is equally beyond denial. That it did 
not accomplish all the friends of liberty and progress hoped from 
it, must also be admit! ed. But that France and Europe were waked 
by it from a nightmare of regal and ecclesiastical tyranny, 
can admit of no question. As the fires of the French Revolution 
consumed the painted mask of hj'pocrisy and falsehood by 
which truth had been concealed, the people leaped up trem- 
bling with rage and bewildered by the new light that blazed 
in the face of the world. But that real progress has resulted is 
attested by achievements in this century, the proudest in the history 
of the race. All over Europe the two great revolutions in the 
New World and in the Old opened fresh prospects for the develop- 
ing masses, and enthroned new ideas of popular liberty and social 
culture. People began to be recognized as the sources of power, 
and kings as the servants of peoples. Constitutional government 
has taken the place of absolutism, and freedom of thought the 
place of regal and priestly infallibility. 

Important as these political changes were to the people of 
Europe, to us they were significant chiefly from the social and 
industrial changes for which they opened the way. Despotic 
government is neither the handmaid of industry nor the promoter 



ORATION — GEN. DURBIN WARD. 583 

of social progress. A sense of individual power strengthens the 
humblest. While the long wars of the French Revolution checked 
the growth of population, the freer spirit everywhere arising 
in the laboring classes tended to cultivate industry ; and the 
increase of commerce and manufactures which followed these wars 
vastly increased the wealth and population in most countries 
of Europe, and especially in Great Britain and Germany, whence 
most of our immigrants come. 

If we turn from the political field of action to that wider 
and even more potential realm wherein ideas, not armies nor 
statute-books rule ; if we contemplate society instead of govern- 
ment, and consider progress as the ultimate aim of human organiza- 
tion, how immeasurably grand is the field opened by a review of 
the last century ! Into whatever region of thought we choose 
to enter ; into whatever class of culture we extend our inspection ; 
into whatever depths of science we seek to delve, what century 
can compare in achievement with that just ended ? In the field 
of learning much work had already been done, for all true 
knowledge is a growth. From the immemorial past ideas had 
been grafted upon perceptions and systems upon ideas, until great 
advancement had been made in religion, government, law, science, 
literature and art. All along through the ages one accumulation 
after another had been made in knowledge. But the splendor 
of this centennial century in Europe and America stands alone. 
If time allowed we might point out the progress of natural 
science, political economy, ethnology, biblical criticism, social science 
and speculative philosophy. In the very year of our declaration 
the discovery of Oxygen and the publication of the wealth of 
nations did more to change the future industries of the world than 
can be awarded to the work of any preceding century. The 
discovery of Oxygen is the Novum Organum of Physics, and t 
has supplied a solvent that makes nature give up her inmost 
secrets to the uses of man. The " Wealth of Nations " was the 
Novum Organum of economical science, and though political 
economy has been inaptly called the " dismal science," no branch 
of knowledge has done more for the every day needs of the 
people. With these two great advances in knowledge added 
to the proclamation in our count n of the sovereignty of the people, 



584 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

a new era began throughout the Christian world. The Copcrnican 
system, and the discovery of America, and Newton's law of 
gravitation, and Harvey's circulation of the blood, and the Reforma- 
tion, had each opened the way on a grand scale for the new 
age, and with those brawniest arms of civilization, the printing 
press and steam as the servants of the new ideas, the whole 
spirit of society was changed. The age became practical. 
Public opinion became a ruling power. Comforts and wealth 
were diffused by every-day knowledge. The newspaper became a 
necessity. The ease and rapidity of travel made the world 
one people, and the constant interchange of sentiments and 
ideas uprooted old conservatisms and urged on the car of progress. 
The people are better clothed and fed — better lodged and edu- 
cated. Sanitary science and medical skill have almost banished 
from the earth those fierce scourges which often decimated 
nations. Labor is better paid ; charities abound, and society is 
the willing guardian of the feeble and helpless. So liberal ideas 
have taken hold of the masses in Europe and America. Religious 
persecution has almost disappeared. The brotherhood of man is 
a popular sentiment. Freedom of opinion is almost conceded 
to be a right. The relations of the sexes are softened and purified. 
The husband no longer beats his wife as a legal right, or keeps a 
mistress without a blush. Kindness governs children and servants 
instead of physical chastisement. The rigor of legal punishments 
is relaxed, and the gallows is nearly obsolete. The whole face of 
society is changed. 

But these changes have brought with them their dangers. The 
altered character of war and the perfection of its implements 
tend to the strengthening of powerful nations at the expense 
of the weak, and worse than all enable organized government to 
wield a stronger arm, and consequently help power to become the 
agent of tyranny. So the almost boundless influence, and the 
reckless licentiousness of the newspaper press endanger the morals 
of society. The tendency of commerce, trade and manufactures 
to congregate the people in huge factories, shops and cities, 
deteriorates their health and moral stamina, and threatens the 
future manhood and womanhood of the people, from the con- 
finement of both sexes in those hot-beds of excitement and disease 



ORATION GEN. DUBBIN WARD. 585 

which large cities, more or less, always are. All this is painfull}' 
apparent in the decrease in the birth of sturdy children. 
But after making all allowances, the general result is in favor 
of the present over the past. The social progress of the 
world in the last century is actual, and the promise of the future 
hopeful. 

Any review, however brief, of the last century, would be in- 
complete if it did not touch its philosophic, scientific and literary 
aspects. Its most remarkable features in this respect are kindred 
to those of its social progress. They are bold and vigorous. The 
critical investigation of past history, sacred and profane, has been 
searching and profound. The kaleidoscopic fables of the east, of 
Greece and Rome, have been unsparingly held up in the sunlight 
of modern criticism. Not a page of the Holy Books of the Hindu, 
the Persian or the Jew, but has been scanned by the philologer 
and the philosopher. Not a rock temple of India, a ruin of Ethi- 
opia or Central America, or a pyramid of Egypt ; nor yet an 
archeological remain of Europe, could escape the eager scrutiny of 
the antiquary. The history and social condition of ancient nations 
have been investigated with a critical zeal. And these studies 
have not been so much for ornament as for use. The indiscrim- 
inate laudation of old countries and institutions was the fashion two 
hundred years ago, but now the historian or the essayist investi- 
gates that he may portray the past in its true colors. 

Nor have the old superstitions of science fared better at the 
hands of the modern scientist. Antique systems have been de- 
manded to show their authority, and the seals of their commissions 
have often been challenged as spurious. Nature has been ques- 
tioned in a severe but loving spirit, and her responses compared in 
every tongue to make sure they were not Delphic. Patient in- 
vestigation has disclosed in nature, in matter and force, rh birth and 
decay, in life and progress, the unending universality of law, 
changeless and eternal. The reasoning faculty of man has grown 
with every new acquisition of knowledge, and in the pride of its 
power questions everything human and divine. Perhaps the most 
striking intellectual feature of the age is the evolution theory of 
organic existence and of human life itself. Bold and daring indeed 
is the philosophy of the nineteenth century. In its spirit it follows 



580 <>l i; NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

the experimental methods of the Baconian system, and the future 
alone can pass on its true value. 

But though reason usually gains strength at the expense of the 
imagination and often to the detriment of the emotions, yet the 
last century has been rich in every species — some very poor — of 
literary productions. In poetry and romance, in art and music, it 
compares well with any antecedent age. In fulness and richness 
— perhaps not in originality — it has no peer. That the reasoning 
power has advanced at the expense of the imagination can hardly be 
doubted, and yet a Goethe and a Byron have lived in our age. 
The loftiest thought, the wildest imagination, the tenderest emotion, 
have all found expression in philosopher and poet and philan- 
thropist in the stormy nineteenth century. While liberty to all 
brings hope to the lowly, in the struggling soul of humanity glows 
the spark of genius, 

" And tints to-morrow with prophetic ray." 

The intellectual and moral characteristic of the age is its skepticism. 
Not the narrow and bigoted infidelity that marked the last century 
preceding, not the scoffing of the idiot unbeliever, but that earnest, 
devout skepticism which acknowledges no criterion of truth but 
human judgment, and bows to no superior but the Universe. To 
the timid this may portend evil. But honest skepticism is the true 
herald of progress. Whatever will not stand investigation is not 
entitled to stand at all. The weak in head or heart may fall by 
the way-side, but the true believe] 1 , — the believer in truth, — whose 
faith is winnowed from the chaff of doubt, will, like the martyrs of 
old, be the seed of the future Church. Want of faith in everything 
established is the great danger of the future, and yet its great 
hope. The skeptic of one age is the prophet of the next. No 
period has ever been more transitional than ours ; and though there 
may be some tares springing up in the wheat now being sown, the 
future will reap a rich harvest, temporal and spiritual for the sus- 
tenance of the coming generations of men. 

In all this vast general movement of human life, our country 
has borne its share, and our example has had its influence on tho 
world. 



ORATION GEN. DURBIN WARD. 587 

While in material progress our country has, in the last century, 
surpassed all nations, we can also, with justice, say our people have 
advanced more rapidly in general intelligence than those of any 
other country. The high tone of the masses may well be the 
honest boast of Americans. In general diffusion of knowledge, in 
moral and social rectitude, in domestic purity and comfort, the com- 
mon people of our country stand in the foremost rank. If much of 
this is due to the immigration from Europe of the better and not the 
worse classes of its laboring population, and to the facility with 
which in the United States comfortable homes may be had, much, too, 
is due to our admirable system of common schools, our large circula- 
tion of newspapers and periodical literature, and our widely diffused 
and liberal religious teaching. The general intelligence is likewise 
cultivated by our political institutions. The public discussion on 
the hustings of political issues, the broad basis of suffrage, and the 
distribution to the very extremities of the nation of the powers of 
local government ; and perhaps still more than all, the educating 
process of trial by jury, makes the Government a popular school- 
master. All sexes and ages, through the workings of our system, 
are receiving instruction by the administration of the laws, and this 
is not the least of the merits of that administration. The citizen 
is not only made to feel that the Government and the law are 
sacred, because created and administered by and for the peo- 
ple, but the sense of individual responsibility is cultivated and 
the range of popular thinking enlarged. So, too, the manifold 
forms and instruments of our industry promote popular culture. 
The omnipresence of the railroad, telegraph, printing-press, steam 
engine, agricultural and mechanical implements, and the myriad 
magic fingers of machinery, teach the people practical knowledge, 
and excite that wonder and curiosity which lead to many an advance 
in physical science ; while fairs and expositions, social festivals and 
public concerts and amusements give aid to the hearth-stone, the 
school-room and the church, in that general culture which is the 
surest basis of public virtue, and the indispensable bulwark of free 
Government. 

Conscious, however, as we are of the general intelligence of our 
people, we have to admit that in the higher walks of mental cul- 
true we have advanced with less rapid strides. This is doubtless 



588 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

to a great extent at least due to our situation. We have lived in 
a new country, in which a hand to hand struggle with the rude 
forces of nature was not only a necessity but the highest duty. 
Food and shelter for the family are the first objects to be sought 
in every stage of human progress. "When these have to be wrested 
by force, in an inclement climate, from a virgin soil, the sturdiest 
industry will find time for little else. And whatever leisure is 
found, naturally takes the direction of making improvements in 
the instruments with which to extort from rugged nature the 
means of subsistence. Discoveries and inventions tending to 
physical improvement are the natural result. And in our country 
we are abreast if not superior to all nations in the practical arts 
and inventions, and the labor-saving implements, which promote 
production. , We needed them most, and they came at the call of 
American genius. If we did not invent the steam engine, we 
made it subserve the humblest as well as the highest industries. 
It was our Fulton who first made the steamer 

" Walk the waters like a thing of life." 

And it was our pioneers who made the steam saw to migrate from 
forest to forest. If we did not discover the existence of electric- 
ity, our Franklin first taught the world to shield their habitations 
from its lightning blasts. . If we did not teach the lightning to 
speak, our Morse taught it to use the best language. If the 
Mother Country first harnessed the iron horse, soon afterward we 
had him champing the bit on this side of the water, and leaping 
over mountain and plain and river, through city and forest and 
tunnel, with flaming nostril and neck clothed with thunder, till 
lately, almost keeping pace with the sun, he bounded from ocean 
to ocean. And while the ruder wants of our pioneer life were be- 
ing supplied, the higher mental culture derived from the study of 
science, literature and art were not entirely neglected. Though 
too busy in the battle of the hammers to devote much time to the 
refined or ornamental, too busy with the practical to dwell much 
on the abstract, we need not be ashamed of what we have done 
even in the world of letters. We may regret that we have not 
done more, but we can j istly congratulate ourselves that we have 
done so much. We can hardly claim that in the highest realms of 



ORATION — GEN. DtRBIN WARD. 589 

philosophy, science, art and literature, we have kept pace with the 
progress of Europe during the last hundred years. In so new a 
country, with institutions so equalizing in their tendency, we could 
not have that accumulated wealth and consequent leisure so neces- 
sary to barely abstract or ornamental studies. No name in the 
highest rank of philosophy or poetry, of science or literature, has 
been contributed by America to the world's intellectual galaxy. 
We have no Bacon or Shakespeare, Newton or Locke. Nor has 
our first century produced a Humboldt or Davy or Darwin or 
Herbert Sj)encer, nor a Goethe or Burns, Byron or Wordsworth. 
But still, America has not been dumb ; and even in the world of 
thought as well as in the world of action her voice has been heard. 
The fame of many of her writers gives earnest of what may be 
expected in every field of intellectual and moral effort when the 
young giant of the West has matured her dawning faculties by an- 
other century of culture. 

As might naturally be looked for our popular institutions have 
drawn too large a proportion of the intellect and culture of the 
country into the field of politics. Gradually men of ability are 
seeking literary, and other pursuits, giving leisure for more refined 
culture and deeper research. In one of the governing forces of a 
republic we have, therefore, equalled, if not excelled any people. 
Our orators everywhere abound. We could stock the Senates of 
the world with fine speakers. Patrick Henry, John Adams, 
Pinkney, West, Randolph, Corwin, Choate, Everett, Wendell 
Phillips, and a list of others too long to recall, without speaking 
of Webster, Calhoun and Clay justly entitle America to be called 
a nation of orators. And in the literature of law and politics too 
we are entitled to a high place, and the political writings of many 
an American will be read with deep interest centuries to come. 
We cannot omit to notice how rapidly the ideas of old times have 
been liberalized in their practical application in this country, not 
only in law, politics, government and industry, but in domestic 
and social life as well as in religion, science and literature. The 
stiff forms of the old law practice have passed away. Neither 
interest, race, or religious belief now disqualifies a witness. Im- 
prisonment for debt, except in cases of fraud, is abolished. Home- 
stead and exemption laws protect the poor. Divorces are obtain- 



590 OtJR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

able and married women's property rights secured. Equal dis- 
tribution of property is secured to all heirs alike, and primogeni- 
ture and entailments are abolished. Simplicity of deeds and trans- 
fers have been introduced, security of possession enforced by 
liberal statutes of limitation and many other modifications of the 
old law adopted tending to equality among all classes and races. 
So the criminal code has been toned down and prisoners have bail, 
and counsel and witnesses are allowed at the public charge ; and 
prisoners may even be witnesses for themselves. The stocks and 
the whipping post are no more. So everywhere schools are prac- 
tically free. Charities, asylums, invalid homes, cover the land so 
that the young and the imbecile, the erring and the insane are 
cared for by private munificence or at the public charge. What 
the old kings spent on retainers and armies, the young republic 
devotes to charities. And religious intolerance in our country is 
quite gone. Excommunication from the fold of the Church is a 
dead letter. Each can worship under his own vine and fig-tree 
with none to molest or make him afraid and God alone can call 
any man to account for his religious belief. The State aids no 
church but equally protects all. The Cathedral and the Syna- 
gogue, peacefully confront each other, the High Church and the 
Conventicle are friendly neighbors and even the Free-thinker's 
Hall is under protection of law. And so, too, industry is free. 
Unlike the old countries every man here may follow any pursuit 
without government license or legally prescribed apprenticeship. 
No property qualification is required for public place, nor even for 
social standing. Every one may take his place in that rank of life 
for which he can show himself fitted. Husbands, wives and chil- 
dren are bound together practically by the law of love alone. So 
freedom of opinion, of speech, of the press, is everywhere recog- 
nized and scarcely ever invaded unless it be momentarily in the 
excitement of political contests; or in the occasional outburst of 
popular wrath at some flagrant abuse of this freedom. 

But we must not pause longer to recount the past. The star of 
our country's destiny is hope, not memory. It is a morning, not 
an evening star. We are girding ourselves for work, not resting 
from labor. When we turn about us and behold our mighty em- 
pire of territory and our still mightier empire of future people we 



ORATION — GEN. DURBIN WARD. 591 

are oppressed with a sense of infinitude. Bounded by the Atlantic 
and Pacific, washed by the ocean gulf at the south and the ocean 
lakes at the north ; divided into two breathing lobes of life by the 
Mississippi, the Mediterranean of the Republic, no physical empire 
yet vouchsafed to any Government has had the giant proportions 
of the United States. With mountains on the east, and still loftier 
mountains on the west, pregnant with the richest ores for use and 
ornament and groaning for deliverance of their treasures, they 
ask but enterprise and time to pour into the lap of wealth their 
untold millions. Surrounded in every region of our domain with 
boundless leagues of fertile soil, annually tickled by the yeoman's 
plow, and laughing back smiling harvests in his face, the swarming 
hives of our population will find ample scope for their children's 
homes, for countless prolific generations of freemen. With a com- 
merce whose sails shall yet whiten every sea, at home and abroad, 
our people shall gather the products of every clime in exchange for 
our own. Our teeming factories shall fill the land with the sound 
of hammers and the hum of spindles till the music of industry shall 
compose a grander symphony than ever Mozart or Beethoven con- 
ceived. Cities whose population shall be counted by millions ; 
villages nestling in coves of mountains or bays, or picturesque 
curves of rivers, or sleeping in shady valleys ; farm-houses of 
sturdy yeomen, but palaces in elegance and comfort, shall yet arise 
to gladden the eye. Railroads and steamers shall by every plain 
and river bring each region in close and constant communion with 
every other. The tropics and the frozen zone shall supply us, as 
home productions, with the sunny fruits and the warming furs, 
while the fibers, and cereals, and minerals — all the products of 
our native hands — shall make us a world within ourselves. 

But wealth and luxury are sources of weakness rather than 
strength if not accompanied by intellectual vigor and moral recti- 
tude. Our unbounded future wealth, and consequent temptations 
to luxury and dissipation can not but excite the fears of the 
thoughtful. Shall we live over again the history of old countries ? 
Shall the haughty millionaire, as in decaying Borne, enslave the 
free spirit of the people, corrupt their morals by his licentious 
habits, or purchase their suffrages by his bribes ? Shall liberty 
become a form and despotism a fact? If these be the results of 



592 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

your wealth and grandeur, what matters it that fountains, and 
rostrums and statues adorn your streets ? What matters it that 
parks and gardens, and palaces crown your suburbs ? What 
matters it that expositions of your industry build splendid struc- 
tures, or your plastic tastes construct gorgeous theatres, museums 
of art, or concert halls ? What matters it that saintly formalists 
point the spires of cathedral and church to unresponsive Heaven ? 
The grand material future of America must, if we would not 
soon be numbered with the nations of the past, be but the minis- 
ter of coming ages of intellectual glory. Simplicity of life, purity 
of morals, and those lofty purposes which make heroes of the 
humblest, must characterize our jieople or their coming power and 
splendor will inevitably corrupt and ruin them. We have every 
incentive to prompt to intellectual culture and moral purity. The 
freedom of our institutions, the early fame of our country, the 
revered name of our ancestors, the future of our children — to what 
higher motives could appeal be made ? If we are true to these tra- 
ditions and hopes, how grandly looms the Republic upon the 
vision ! The second Centennial will find that glorious banner 
now waving over us covering and protecting a hundred milli- 
ons of high-souled, intelligent, free citizens. Not only a broad 
domain, wealth, and power shall make us the republican em- 
press of the world's destiny, but intelligence, virtue and courage 
— high manhood and womanhood — shall fill every household 
and insure the perpetuity of the American Republic. And when 
the next Centennial shall dawn we shall be not only untold mil- 
lions of happy freemen, surrounded by palatial grandeur, internal 
peace and social and domestic purity, but the Great Republic will 
be the intellectual and moral leader of the world. 



THE CHANGES OF A CENTUKY, 

AN ORATION BY S. O. GRISWOLD, ESQ., 

DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION IN THE CITY 
OF CLEVELAND, OHIO. JULY 4TH, 1876. 

Mr. President and Fellow-Citizens, — The phenomena of 
movement in the heavenly hodies could not fail to arrest the atten- 
tion of men in the primeval days. The natural impulse of those 
untaught men was worship, which lifted upward their hearts, con- 
veying their thoughts from material to spiritual conceptions, and 
inducing a culture which slowly led them from savagery to civili- 
zation. 

In the earlier times this culture extended heyond the mere 
alteration of days and nights and led them to the observation of the 
recurrence of long periods, and to the divisions of time, known as 
months, years, cycles, centuries. These divisions of time naturally 
became the point from which to date events that perpetuated them- 
selves in the world's memory. But in the progress of the race, 
as by natural metaphor, this order was reversed, and great events 
themselves became the marking points in the time and history. 

In that great city of antiquity, which subdued the cultured east 
and the barbaric west, and for so many centuries imposed its law 
and rule upon the world, time was officially reckoned from its 
own beginning. For ordinary purposes they adopted the received 
chronology, and their own greatest genius reformed the calendar, 
and furnished the rules for its universal use ; but all public acts 
were officially dated, Anno Urbis Oonditce — from the year of the 
founding of the city — and in this designation there was a continued 
appeal to the pride and patriotism, alike of rulers and people. 

When the nations of Western Europe emerged from the barbar- 
ism into which they relapsed after the withdrawal of the central 
power of the empire, they had nothing in their own national expe- 
rience upon which to found a chronological succession. Thechiefs 



594 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

of that hierarchy which succeeded the imperial with their spiritual 
sway, adopted for general use the Julian tables ; and these Western 
nations, more submissive to priestly than political supremacy, 
readily accepted their instruction, and took with them, as their 
initial point in reckoning, that which they were taught to believe 
was the year of the Divine Advent to earth in their behalf. 

Offspring of these "Western nations, the people of America con 
tinued the use of the common calendar, but the founders of the 
new form of Government, when they ordained the same in this 
Western Hemisphere, took a new departure in time. With more 
than prophetic prescience, they believed that here would arise and 
grow an Empire of the People, mightier and more beneficent than 
that of Rome. Animated by that great example, and influenced by 
the same motives, they intended all acts of their Government, so 
long as it endured, should bear proper relation in time and history 
to that great event, — the Birth of the Nation, and so they practiced ; 
and whenever an act has been or is done in the name of the Gov- 
ernment it is always recited as " Done in the year of the 

Independence of the United States of America." 

And we, fellow-citizens, are here assembled to celebrate the 
Hundredth Anniversary of that event. It is in the highest degree 
appropriate that this celebration should be conducted by the per- 
formance of religious ceremonies, by music, by civil and military 
display, and by all the modes in which intelligent men may testify 
their reverence, their gratitude, and their joy. It has also been 
recommended by Congress and the President of the United States 
that on the occasion of this celebration, in each town and city, 
there should be prepared an address, embodying the local history 
of the place, the same to be deposited in the archives of the Nation. 
In this city of ours there exists a Society, the object and jDurpose 
of which is to collect and preserve all the material relating to the 
history of the place from the earliest period to the present date, 
and the distinguished President of that association has prepared 
with great care and labor that history, and Ills work is set forth in 
an elaborate volume, which is already deposited in the National 
library. 

It was therefore requested of me by your Committee of Arrange- 
ments that this recommended duty he on my part omitted, and in 



ORATION — S. O. OUISWOLD, ESQ. 595 

their behalf to submit to you a few words such as T should deem 
fit and appropriate to the time and occasion. 

I doubt not, the thought uppermost in the minds of all, is the 
change during the Century. On the 4th day of July, 177G, Cleve- 
land was not ; and now behold the fair city with all its pride and 
beauty in which we are assembled — located on a site which would 
have delighted even a Greek Eponymist — itself a living exhibition 
of the progress, the development, and the results of the century. 
If one were possessed of the painter's skill or engraver's art, there 
might be presented a scene which would convey to your minds by 
a single glance all the grand features of that contrast which a 
volume of words would fail to express. Here would be shown the 
broad lake, its waters unvexed by keel or prow, washing a tenant- 
less shore, with a river debouching from a vast forest into it, whose 
sluggish waters were slowly forcing their way through the bar at 
the mouth of the channel. In the forest glade, might be seen, a 
few savage men maintaining a precarious conflict for life with 
equally savage beasts. There, might be seen, the ocean line, its 
border fringed with the habitations of men, and their overhanging 
sun and sky would be darkened by smoke of the battle of contend- 
ing armies. In the center of that habited region, there would be 
seen a fair city, the abode of peaceful men ; in the city's midst, a 
council chamber, in which was gathered a company of Elders, 
whose form and appearance would indicate that Plutarch's men 
had returned to earth again. The chief of that council would be 
holding in his hand an unrolled scroll upon which all eves were 
intent, and on that scroll, in letters all of living gold, flashing with 
a brighter than electric light, those never to be forgotten words, 
" All men are created equal." There, leading out from the in- 
habited land, might be seen a procession, the leader of which was 
a surveyor, with his compass and chains ; following him a hardy 
emigrant, axe in hand, with his slow team of oxen bearing his 
family and scanty household goods ; then would appear an estab- 
lished highway with moving teams of better appointed travelers; 
then, the artificial inland river with its slow-moving burdened 
craft; then, the rushing locomotive, followed by a great company 
which no man might number. Here, might be seen, the woodman 
making a clearing in the forest, and beyond, the cabin, the school- 



596 OUll NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

house, the church, fair fields, plains, cities, and stretching out an 
illumined vista horizoned by the millennial gates, the groupings of 
which scene none but a God might frame, and only the genius of 
Homer fitly describe. 

I find it most difficult, from the many striking features which 
this great contrast of the century presents, to select a topic for re- 
mark in the brief time allowed me in the performance of the 
ceremonies of the day, but I have chosen, and I purpose for a few 
moments calling your attention to the Continental Congress, as 
connected with the subject of Government by the Representative 
Assembly. 
/ " In the early days, when men were limited in numbers and 
association to the family, the village, or tribe, the problems of 
government were few and simple ; but when numbers increase, 
ideas enlarge, the village becomes a city, and the tribe a nation, 
these problems become all-absorbing questions. How to combine 
individual liberty with central authority ; to protect the simple and 
guileless from the artful and cunning ; to insure peace, order, and 
security to life and property, and yet not fall into the meshes of 
tyranny ; on the one hand to be free from the evils of anarchy, and 
on the other from the evils of despotism — are questions" which have 
occupied the best thoughts of the best men in all civilized States. 
I need not dwell upon the disturbing forces against which no 
theory can provide, or upon the thousand practical attempts at the 
solution of these problems. I hesitate not to say, and I believe it 
to be the unbiased judgment of the " candid world," that of all the 
modes of government which the wit of wisdom of man has yet 
contrived, the best and most successful is the Representative As- 
sembly. 

I do not deny the excellency of the Ancient City. I acknowl- 
edge the glory of the Periklean State, but the strain was too great 
for human nature to endure, where every citizen is continually 
called upon to exercise the functions of a legislator, a judge, and a 
soldier. For a short period the system shone with great splendor 
and its light still illumines mankind, but it was adapted only to 
limited territorial possession, and required its citizens to be supported 
by the labor of a servile clas^. 

I acknowledge the peace and security of the Empire. Under 



ORATION — S. O. GKISAVOLD, ESQ. 597 

its benign and peaceful sway, local and provincial enmities were 
subdued, free intercourse established throughout the world, and the 
sure foundations laid for the steady development of all the arts and 
ideas which lead to a more perfect civilization. But the. Empire 
at its best estate operates as a thrall on human energy and thought, 
and is only successful when its chief is a Hadrian ; but if the 
emperor be a Caligula, it would seem as if the world had been 
given over to the power of the Priuce of Darkness. 

The Representative Assembly appears to be the just mean. 
Under it the whole electoral body are called upon to exercise some 
political duties. To the great majority, these duties are not 
absorbing, and leave them the full opportunity for their own best 
development in mind, body, and estate. Those, who are called 
upon to exercise the functions of rulers, are themselves members of 
the electoral body, and, in theory, are selected because of some 
special qualifications of fitness for their respective stations. They 
can have no interest, as a class, antagonistic to the general electoral 
body, and hold their station by the choice of their fellow-electors. 

The history of the origin of this mode of government is lost, in 
the lost early history of our race. Its rise and progress can only 
be traced in the survivals of ancient customs. Its germ undoubt- 
edly existed in those ancient councils of the German forest, when 
the yea was pronounced by the clashing of buckler, and the nay by 
equally significant dissent. 

It is the great contribution of the Teutonic race to the common 
civilization of the world. It was an idea, when once conceived of, 
too valuable to be lost. It possessed of itself a vital force, which 
would not permit it to be destroyed. It survived among the people 
during the period of the Roman domination, nor was it buried, 
in the barbarism which ensued. It reappeared in the Gemot and 
Witan and found its first, fullest development in the Parliament of 
England, whose people were the growth of the graftings of the 
best stocks of the race. 

Of all the famous assemblies which have ever convened, none 
can favorably compare with the Continental Congress save the Long 
Parliament, and the French National Assembly. The Continental 
Congress was more successful and fortunate than either of these. 
The Long Parliament degenerated into a mob, and was dispersed 



598 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

with contemptuous words by the servant itself had chosen to exe- 
cute its command, and he, after vainly attempting to establish for 
t a successor, was compelled to uphold the tottering state by his 
own vigorous will. The French National Assembly shrank into a 
murderous club, from whose bloody hands the nation was only 
saved by submitting itself to the rule of a dictator : and for nearly 
a hundred years that brilliant nation has passed through the great- 
est alterations, and only in our day, under the bitter mortification 
of a foreign occupation finally established the Representative As- 
sembly. 

The Continental Congress, though more favored by fortune, was 
no product of chance, or of sudden inspiration. It was the result 
of centuries of experience. It was the natural outgrowth of the 
race, with special advantages of time and place. In the first cen- 
tury following the discovery of America, the Spanish nation was 
the foremost power of the world, and the energies of that people 
had been directed to Central America, their chief object the gain 
of wealth ; to aid the old and not to establish a new empire. Dur- 
ing the first half of that century the English nation had been 
engaged in internal conflict. Its whole people had been aroused 
by the great religious awakening of the Reformation, but these 
internal conflicts had for a time greatly weakened the state. During 
the long sway of Elizabeth the nation had recuperated, and the 
capacity of the race and its general development were shown by 
the appearance in a single generation of such men as Raleigh, 
Bacon, and Shakespeare. 

When the Armada was destroyed England stepped to the front 
rank ; and all those eager eyes which behold the future turned their 
gaze to this Western Hemisphere. The first emigrants were of 
course mere adventurers for gain, or religious enthusiasts, who 
combined in themselves some of the best as well as worst elements 
of human nature, but they were not the stuff out of which nations 
are formed. 

The troublous times which preceded the Great Rebellion induced 
hither an immense emigration. I lately noted, in a publication 
containing the official register of the port of London, that in the 
month of April and May of the year 1 635 there sailed from that 
port alone bound for New England and Virginia, twenty-two ships 



ORATION S. O. GUIS WOLD, ESQ. HM 

loaded with passengers. Tn one of these the names of two hundred 
and eleven passengers are given in full, and those names have 
been perpetuated, and some of them may be read to-day on the 
signs in your business streets. In the ten years, from 1630 to 
1640, the great bulk of the emigration of the first half of the 
century took place. I also noted in the same register, that these 
persons who embarked had obtained from the proper parish officer 
a certificate, either that they had. paid or were not subject to the 
subsidy (ship money) tax. They were men of the substantial 
middle class of the people upon whom this burden fell grievously. 
They had not the same stake in the soil as the great leaders of the 
opposition to the Government, and when they emigrated hither, 
they came with the intent of building up in Massachusetts, Con- 
necticut, and Virginia a new England, free from the existing thral- 
doms of their native land. They had the average education of the 
middle class. The influence of the Reformation had awakened 
and quickened their moral natures, and they had had experience in 
civil rights as jurymen and members of municipal and village coun- 
cils. If not rich in worldly goods, they had two priceless posses- 
sions ; a devout regard for the moral rule, and a knowledge of the 
common law. They came generally by communities, the large 
majority accustomed to agricultural pursuits, hut they endeavored 
always to unite and join with them in their enterprise, the mason 
and the carpenter, the tanner and the shoemaker, and all the 
tradesmen needful to form a complete industrial society. There 
came also with them religious teachers who had generally received 
the culture of the Universities, and lawyers who had been trained 
at the Temple. They were, in the main, a devout, industrious, 
thriving people, and above all a race of surpassing valor. They 
were brethren and next of kin of the famous Ironsides of Crom- 
well ; soldiers, who, in fair and open fight on their common native 
soil, overcame cavalier, noble, and prince ; who swept as with the 
whirlwind the hardy Scot at Dunbar, ami trampled as ou the chaff 
of the threshing floor the Irishry of Minister ; and who, when their 
service ended, quietly disbanded and fused with the mass of the 
people, and in the succeeding years when in community any one 
was distinguished above his fellows " for diligence in business, 
sobriety, and regularity in the pursuit of peace," it was to be noted 



600 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

of him that he had been a soldier in the regiments of Cromwell 
Owing to the advantages of soil and climate their natural increase 
was great and there was added to them a continued accession by 
emigration. 

In the forms of government provided by tlie charters of the 
different colonies, the principles of representative government were 
always included ; indeed, in the framing of those charters, and in 
providing modes of constituting the Representative Assembly, the 
wisest and purest scholars and statesmen of England were often 
consulted, and some of these charters were so excellent as to have 
remained without change long after tlie Revolution. 

It was not till after the subjugation of the Canadas, to which 
the soldiers of the colonies had greatly contributed, that difficul- 
ties began to arise. Hitherto they had either been left to them- 
selves, or if interfered with, it had been done with good will, and 
a purpose to aid and foster their growth. The oppressive acts of 
Parliament, of which the colonist complained, were rather the re- 
sult of prejudice and ignorance than of any real design to injure. 
The King of England was not a man of cruelty, or possessed of 
any purpose to be unfaithful to any of the principles of the British 
Constitution, which, by his coronation oath, he had sworn to up- 
hold. It is to be noted that most of the charges set forth in that 
terrible arraignment which has just been read in your hearing, 
were acts done after the conflict had ripened into war. But the 
King was grossly ignorant, and was obstinate to a degree almost 
amounting to insanity — in fact, he subsequently became insane. 
The amusing stories related by our citizens who travel abroad, of 
the present extreme ignorance in regard to this country on the 
part of apparently intelligent people, are but a faint shadow of the 
general ignorance which then prevailed. 

A few far-seeing statesmen realized the actual condition of 
affairs, and most nobly, but in vain, sought to stay the hand of the 
Government, which was daily proceeding from bad to worse. In 
1774, matters had proceeded so far that a Congress, deputed in 
part by the Colonial Assemblies, and in part by political conven- 
tions, met at Philadelphia to consult for the common good. They 
passed a preamble and resolutions, asserting their rights under the 
Bjjtish Constitution, and recited the numerous a^s gi Parliament 



ORATION — S. O. GRISWOLD, ESQ. 601 

which they deemed to be in derogation of their rights under the 
common law. They recommended to the people modes of peace- 
ful resistance, and adopted a memorial to the British Government. 
The idea of a separation had not yet pervaded the minds of the 
people, and they looked up to England as to a venerated mother. 
In her soil were entombed the bones of their fathers and kindred, 
and they felt themselves to be partakers in her splendid fame. 
They had with alacrity sprung to arms at her call to battle against 
the ancient enemies of the nation. They eagerly marched under 
her standard to drive the French from the Canadas, and were 
equally ready to join in expelling the Spaniard from the Antilles 
and Central America. They claimed none of the ordinary ex- 
emptions from military duty. The Major-General of the forces of 
one of the colonies, an ancestor of one of your most eminent 
divines, was aged sixty-seven. In the journal left by him, in 
which he kept a record of the long and successful campaign against 
Louisburg, the most valuable part is that which evinces the un- 
abated vigor of his body and mind and his profound regard for the 
Colonial Assembly, from which he had received his commission. 
Another distinguished officer, being dissuaded from accepting a 
command offered by the same Assembly in the expedition against 
the Spaniards, on account of his family and the dangers of a trop- 
ical climate as well as the dangers of war, replied : " I can leave 
my family with Divine Providence, and as to my own life, it is 
not left with man to determine the time or place of his death. I 
think it best not to be anxious about it. The great thing is to 
live and die in our duty. I think the war is just. My call is 
clear. Somebody must venture, and why not I as well as an- 
other ? " The voice of the General Assembly was to him as the 
call of God to the Prophet of old, and in the same spirit of obe- 
dience he answered, " Here am I." Death relieved him of his 
command, and his grave was soon hidden by the rank growth of 
that tropic soil, but his faith was well founded, his family have 
continued, and one of his direct descendants is a citizen of your 
city, who by his great accpiirements and contributions to geologic 
science, has made your city distinguished as a home of learning. 

At the beginning of the latter half of the century, the Holland- 
ers and Swedes, who were the predominating element of the Mid- 



6U2 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

die States, had become indistinguishable from the common mass of 
the citizens. The former were a tough and hardy race, which had 
been trained to a high development under the leadership of the 
true, princely house of Orange ; the fathers of the latter had fol- 
lowed the victorious banner of Gustavus Adolphus, to uphold the 
cause of religious liberty against the combined forces of the 
Papacy and the Empire, and both were of the original stocks ol 
the Anglo-Saxon combination. The small element of the Celtic 
and Huguenot class, by their religions training was fitted to as- 
similate with the rest of the people. 

Undoubtedly, the comparatively lean soil and more severe 
climate of Massachusetts had forced her citizens to fisheries, com- 
merce, and other active pursuits, and given to them a more ad- 
venturous spirit, which, with their numbers and wealth, naturally 
gave them the leadership ; but on the whole, the inhabitants were 
a homogeneous people. For more than a century their civic edu- 
cation had been promoted by the rule of the Colonial Assemblies. 
In his great speech in Parliament in favor of conciliation of the 
Colonies, that famous orator and statesman, who, it has been said, 
possessed in the highest degree the faculty of perceiving the dis- 
tant and the past, as if it were actually present, mentions the fact 
of the number of the copies of Blackstone's Commentaries ex- 
ported hither, and statistics show that more volumes were here 
annually sold than in the rest of the kingdom. Their experience 
in the Indian and French wars had accustomed them to the use of 
arms, and trained them in the art of war. Of all these things, the 
blind Tory majority which ruled Parliament and supported the 
King were profoundly ignorant. The memorial of the Congress 
of 1774 was treated with contempt, and regarded as a sign of 
weakness. In all the pages of history, there is no record of 
greater folly than this, by which the affections of such a loyal 
body of citizens were alienated. The issues rapidly led to open 
conflict in which blood was shed. 

At once the several States took immediate steps for the arma- 
ment of the people. The farmer left his plow ; the artisan his 
toil ; the merchant his pursuit of gain ; the doctor his patients ; 
the lawyer his clients, and all went forth incited and supported by 
the prayers of priest and woman. 



ORATION — S. O. GRISWOLD, ESQ. 603 

On the 10th of May, 1775, the Continental Congress assembled, 
deputed by the different States to assume the general control. 
They came together without precedent, or any fixed rules of au- 
thority. They had no legally established constituency, but one in 
fact existed, which they did not fail to recognize, and for which 
they boldly assumed to act. 

So during the centuries, in the womb of the continent had been 
gendered a nation which knew not itself, whose birth, to the as- 
tonishment of the world, was accomplished by the bloody pangs of 
war, and the Continental Congress, as by divine commission, he- 
stowed upon it baptism and a name. 

Time would fail me to recount the history of that Congress. 
; ' It raised armies, appointed generals, levied taxes, negotiated 
foreign loans and treaties," carried the war to a successful termina- 
tion, and finally extorted from unwilling England a full recogni- 
tion of the perfect legitimacy of this new member of the great 
family of nations. I cannot stop to speak of the difficulties with 
which it had to contend, of the noble manner of its own dissolu- 
tion, or its unselfish action in aiding to submit to the people for 
adoption the New Constitution which was to provide in its stead a 
perpetual successor with lixed and defined powers, the lack of 
which had been the great source of its own weakness. I cannot 
dwell upon the individual character of its members, or even of that 
member whom it appointed to be general of its armies ; that Man 
of men, who, when the victory was won, refusing all compensa- 
tion for his long service, modestly returned to it the sword of com- 
mand, and quietly sought the home he so dearly loved, and to en- 
gage in those avocations and pursuits of peace which he enjoyed 
with so much zest. 

I cannot, however, forbear to mention one of its acts of wise 
statesmanship. Appreciating the importance of the great North- 
west, of which little had then been explored beyond the present 
State of Ohio, they settled and adjusted the conflicting claims of 
the different States to the title of the land, and adopted for the 
Government of the territory the Ordinance of 17*7 ; and to en- 
able the incoming inhabitants to enjoy the "blessings of liberty," 
which the new Constitution was ordained to secure, they ap- 
pointed their own distinguished President to be its Governor — to 



604 OUK NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

protect them by his valor and to teach them by his civil experi- 
ence. 

I should, however, do injustice to my theme if I did not make 
brief comment upon those two great truths they so boldly asserted 
and so resolutely maintained — the civil equality of man, and that 
the consent of the governed gives sanction to Government — those 
truths upon which Government by the Representative Assembly 
is based. After the "lapse of a century we can hardly realize the 
importance of the declaration of these political principles. It is 
still more difficult to appreciate the force and potency of the belief, 
in the world at large, of precisely the contrary doctrine. The 
origin and persistence of this contrary belief, popularly called " the 
Divine right of Kings," is one of the most remarkable chapters in 
the history of the human intellect. 

In the early days, men, unable to give an account of their own 
genesis, and perceiving the manifest distinctions in the gifts of 
mind and body, readily yield to the claim of divine origin by the 
superior man. It is an assumption so flattering to natural pride 
and vanity that the claimants came to believe their own fiction. It 
is one of the survivals of Aryan barbarism, and the belief has per- 
vaded all branches of the race. The Homeric kingly heroes all 
are given a genealogy ascending to Olympus. In historic times, 
the royal houses of Sparta and Macedon called themselves Hera- 
clidaB and traced through their founder, their origin directly to the 
All-seeing Zeus. The other leading families of Greece claimed a 
like descent from him or some other Olympic Divinity. Even the 
great Julius, so cultivated and so enlightened, cherished the weak 
fancy that his ancestral mother was the Divine Beauty, Aphrodite. 
The same belief was current in the old Teutonic tribes. Those 
long-haired warriors, with all their natural independence, conceded 
the right to the family of the Divine Amali to furnish a Chief, or 
King for their selection. The survival of the barbaric days had 
been fostered by the priestly class which, under a like claim of 
divine authority, always sought to rule, or to ally itself with the 
ruling power. A hundred years ago there pervaded nearly the 
whole civilized world a belief that something of sacredness was 
attached to the kingly office. Down into the present century the 
idea, that there was some occult and mysterious power connected 



ORATION — S. O. GMSWOLl), fcs(j. 605 

with the succession to the throne of the Holy Roman Empire, still 
affected the imagination of men. 

This general belief was most rudely assailed when the Lon^ 
Parliament, after arraignment and trial, brought the head of the 
faithless Charles to the block. As a legal entity it was effectually 
eradicated from the British Constitution, when the Convention of 
1688 deposed the foolish sou of the faithless father and called to 
the throne a prince, who solemnly pledged himself torecognize the 
representative assemblies of the nation as the supreme law-making 
power. Yet thousands of pious hearts were greatly outraged at 
this violent deposition of one whom they believed held his office by 
divine right, and had received a visible token thereof, when the 
sacred oil was poured upon his head by a high priest, who, they 
also believed, held his office in the right of an unbroken succession 
I'om the Sou of God ; and they yielded to the new dynasty a 
mournful allegiance, quieting their tender consciences with the 
fond belief that in the new dynasty there could still be found a 
trace of blood of the royal race of the ancient JEthelings. 

The Continental Congress struck at the very root of this belief 
and laid down as an axiom — as a fundamental principle not to be 
questioued — that all men are created equal. Henceforth in the 
State no man was to be regarded as having an inherent right to 
rule. High and low, rich and poor, gifted and simple, all were to 
be equal before the law. In the domain of conscience men might 
still assert divine commission to teach, and in default of production 
of the original parchment of authority, persuade their followers by 
such secondary evidence as they could furnish, but such evidence 
was never to have competency in the State. Men might still 
follow in private belief those who claim such divine authority, but 
in the State, priest and believer, were all to stand as equal children 
of the Common Father. 

These truths of the Declaration of Independence, of course, are 
to be taken with the necessary limitations applicable to all political 
doctrine. They were intended to apply only to men who, by 
culture, had attained to the height of understanding the obligation 
of the moral law. Nor, because they failed to include in their 
State the negro and the Indian, dor-, it follow that the one could 
be rightly held as a slave, or the other exterminated as a savage 



600 OUtt NATIONAL .JUBILLK. 

beast. They laid down the truth for intelligent manhood, and as 
such to be applicable to all men, for all time. With this principle 
as the basis, they anticipated the time when the untaught African 
by training and education, and the savage Indian by the subjection 
of his natural fierceness, might both attain the capacity to enjoy 
the benefits of the Government thus established. 

Of all the progress and achievements of the century, nothing is 
more notable than the steady growth of these truths, and the 
adoption, as a necessary consequent, of the mode of government by 
the Representative Assembly. It has been established in all the 
nations of Western Europe, in United Italy, in resurrected Greece, 
and even among the most progressive peoples of the Turanian 
race. It matters not whether the Executive be chosen by universal 
suffrage, or selected from a particular family, which is made the 
depository of the executive office, whether the executive officer be 
called President, Marshal, Prince, King, or Emperor, in all these 
Nations, the exercise of the executive functions is performed in 
obedience to the Representative Assembly as the law-making 
power. How much of all this is due to the culture and progress 
of the people, or how much of their culture and progress is due 
to this form of government, are questions for the student of history, 
upon which I cannot dwell. 

It may be claimed our great success is more due to the Federal 
than to the Representative system, but the idea of a Federal Union 
was no novel device. It had been long known and used equally 
by pure democracies, and by nations under monarchical rule. It 
was first applied in the later period of the Greek City, and was 
evolved in that struggle when the freedom of Greece was being 
crushed between the upper and nether millstones of Macedon and 
Rome. It was adopted here because of the accident of different 
charters of the different Colonial States. This and the sparseness 
of the population have combined to extend the Federal bond, and 
this Federal system is perhaps the only mode in which the prin- 
ciple of representative government could be applied to so vast a 
country. 

The occasion will not permit me to discuss the methods of select- 
ing the members of the representative body, or the needed reforms 
in existing methods ; and upon fhc <|ii<'s!i<>ii whether the system 



ORATION — S. O. GRISWOLD, ESQ. (ill? 

can be adapted equally to mere municipal government, and to an 
universal state, I can only make a passing remark. The city of 
modern civilization is only a limb, not the soul of the State. Tn it 
the greatest social distinctions arise. It is also the refuge of the 
criminal class, and the home of those who follow occupations for 
which there is no opportunity in rural life. Hitherto the applica- 
tion of this mode to mere municipal rule has not been a pronounced 
success. In its exercise there has occurred misrule, extravagance, 
oppressive taxation, betrayal of trusts, and disgraceful corruption. 
The superficial observer, comparing our greatest city most unfavor- 
able with London or Paris, does not hesitate to declare this mode 
of government, for municipal rule, a failure. It should be remem- 
bered that the breaking up of a new soil is always productive of 
malarial diseases. I cannot stop to discuss the hopes or conditions 
of reform, but merely suggest that even in that great -and illy 
governed city of the United States the opportunity for a free 
education is furnished to every child. 

The possibilities of this system for an universal empire I leave 
to political theorists. For myself I do not believe it can ever be- 
come a practical question. Distinct nationality is one of the con- 
ditions of human existence, and impracticable difficulties arise in 
the attempt to unite what nature itself divides. The opposing in- 
terests will be too great to permit one body to make equal general 
laws. The chain will break by its own weight. The cosmopoli- 
tan is not the ideal man. I appreciate the fine culture which 
eradicates all local manners and prejudices, but its tendency is to 
the elimination of the higher virtues. The earthly millenium is 
an empty dream, for always in human nature there is an inherent 
weakness, and in the blossoming of the highest manly virtues there 
is ever present a scent of provincial flavor. 

The moral of my theme — the conditions of the permanency of 
this mode of government — must be obvious to all. In our genera- 
tion we have witnessed somewhat of a lowering in the character of 
the Representative Assembly, both in the States and Nation, and 
the air is rife with the charges of their corruption. These, how- 
ever, are but mere passing clouds. As are the people, so will be 
the character of their representative bodies. Wealso in our genera- 
tion, with mingled tears of pride, joy, and sorrow, have witnessed 



60$ our national jubilee. 

that the ancient valor of the people is undiminished ; and may we 
not hope in this Centennial year for a renewal of the ancient civic 
virtues. The conditions of these, and of their continuance are 
moral and intellectual culture. It should ever he borne in mind 
that the race is renewed in weakness ; each infant contains in him- 
self all the fierce instincts of the original savage, and he can only 
be brought to perfect manhood by training and education. To 
ieep him in his proper line, those centrifugal tendencies must be 
checked and balanced by these opposing forces. Let the State, by 
invincible and never-changing will, educate the intellect of youth, 
and, trusting to the higher social instincts for the moral culture, 
we may fondly hope that the success of the century will continue 
through the ages. 



PEOGRESS OF THE HUMAN EAOE. 

AN ORATION BY HON. GEORGE L. CONVERSE. 

DELIVERED AT THE CAPITOL, COLUMBUS, OHIO, JULY 4TH, 1876. 

This vast multitude of people here assembled is proof of the 
magnitude and importance of the occasion which has brought us 
together. The happiness beaming from so many thousand up- 
turned faces is proof that we have met in commemoration of no 
ordinary event, and the gratitude and joy and reverence in each 
countenance show that event to have been one with which the 
happiness and welfare of the human family is in some way con- 
nected, and that the event must have been controlled and directed 
in the councils of heaven itself. No other subject could excite so 
much feeling in our bosoms, or move such a multitude by one 
common impulse. 

One hundred years ago to-day, and about this hour, the repre- 
sentatives of the thirteen American colonies, assembled at Inde- 
pendence Hall, in the city of Philadelphia, were in solemn and 
earnest deliberation, upon the subject of American independence 
and the natural rights of man. At about 2 o'clock in the after- 
noon of that memorable day those grand old representative men 
of the last century, reached a conclusion, and adopted by a unani- 
mous vote the Declaration of Independence which has just been 
read in your hearing. Then the old bell in the hall tower swung 
back and forth an hundred times, and with its hundred tongues 
proclaimed liberty throughout the land to all the inhabitants 
thereof. 

A nation was born on that day ; a new member added to the 
family of nations, with a new civilization founded upon natural 
rights. 

" "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created 
equal ; that they are endowed with certain inalienable rights ; that 



610 OUlt NATIONAL JUBILEJE. 

amongst these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness ; that 
to secure these rights governments are instituted among men 
deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed ; that 
whenever any form of government becomes destructive to these 
ends, it is the right of the people to alter or abolish it, and to 
institute new government, laying its foundation on such principles 
and organizing its powers in such form as shall seem most likely 
to effect their safety and happiness." 

This is the American idea — these the cardinal principles upon 
which the new civilization and the new government were based. 
A government of the people, by the people, founded upon natural 
justice. 

Some religionists, both of the United States and Europe, have 
been disposed to grumble at the work of that day, and have charged 
lack of sincerity upon the venerable men who so fearlessly declared 
American independence and the natural right of all men to life,, 
liberty and the pursuit of happiness, because slavery then existed 
and was protected by law in all the thirteen colonies ; and because 
it continued to exist for years, and in some of them for almost a 
century thereafter. 

They claim that the government established by our fathers 
under the Constitution was a covenant with the evil one, rather 
than sanctioned by heaven ; because it recognized and protected 
human slavery in violation of the laws of nature and the principles 
of the declaration. 

Such should remember that time is one of the elements entering 
into nearly all the operations of nature. Thus, a wound upon the 
human body, or upon any living thing, either animal or vegetable, 
cannot be healed in a moment. Nature with the added element 
of time effects a cure. It requires a quarter of a century to rear 
and develop and educate one man. Countless ages of time are 
expended in the great laboratory of nature beneath the sea in lay- 
ing the foundations and building the superstructure of a continent 
and raising it by the hand of our father to the surface — in covering 
it with verdure and peopling it with animal life. Who has for- 
gotten the lesson of patience and faith taught by our blessed Lord 
and Master, in the parable of the tares : " Let both grow together 
until the harvest. ' 



ORATION HON. GEO. L.CONVERSE. Gil 

Instead of being influenced by the censure^ and fault-finding of 
theorists and enthusiasts, the wisdom of our fathers should com- 
mand our highest respect. Their patience, the faith they exhibited 
in their principles, that in due time they would do their perfect 
work in the government, as they have done, are still doing, and 
will continue to do so in the future, should receive our universal 
and unqualified admiration. 

When at this distance of time we look back through the vista of 
an hundred revolving years, and see the whole train of events which 
followed the Declaration of Independence as effects follow a cause, 
and when we observe tne glorious results, as the years, like rain 
drops, fall into the vast ocean of the past, it is easy in our enthu- 
siasm, to see the path of duty and of honor which lay before our 
ancestors ; but when we consider that public opinion was divided, 
that the wealthy and aristocratic classes were in general opposed 
to the step — that the lives of the fifty-six signers, and all others 
who took part, or assisted in carrying forward the measures, were 
at stake, and that failure would result in increased distress of the 
people of the colonies, from the oppressions of the British King ; 
when we see them appeal to the God of battles for the rectitude of 
their intentions, and the justice of their cause — with only two or 
three millions of people — against the most powerful nation then 
on the face of the earth, both their faith and conduct became sub- 
lime. We cannot realize the conflicting emotions that must have 
agitated their manly breasts, as they deliberated upon the momen- 
tous questions, nor the alternating hopes and fears they must have 
felt during that baptism of blood, through the seven years' war 
that followed. 

They possessed not only physical courage, which gave them vic- 
tory in battle, but moral coinage which sustained them in adversity 
and defeat. The blessings of a hundred years rest upon their 
memory! The whole nation doth rise up this day and call them 
blessed. Their example gives courage and hope to the down- 
trodden and the oppressed, and to lovers of liberty everywhere- 
Self-sacrificing, courageous, hopeful, noble men ! Could their days 
have been lengthened out to witness this Centennial year, or could 
they be permitted to leave their heavenly abode and revisit this 
day, the scenes of their earthly struggles and final triumph, or 



612 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

could the windows of»heaven be opened and their disembodied 
spirits be permitted to see (as perhaps they may) the results of 
their toil and labor and self-sacrifice, view the ten thousand gather- 
ings of the people throughout the land — hear the glad shouts of 
fifty millions of people as they hail this Centennial day — feel the 
breath and sweet incense of grateful prayer as it rises from fifty 
millions of thankful hearts to the living God with benedictions 
upon their memory, what sublime joy must pervade their immor- 
tal souls ! 

They would see that instead of being British provinces, subject 
to the laws and dominations of the British crown, we have 
for almost a hundred years enjoyed all the blessings of liberty and 
a republican form of government. That we have grown from 
two or three millions of people to nearly fifty millions ; from 
thirteen weak and sparsely settled Colonies to thirty-seven great, 
prosperous and powerful States, and to-day the State of Colorado 
will come into the Union, making thirty-eight, with two or 
three more asking and ready for admission ; that several of 
the leading States now have each a larger population, more 
wealth and are more powerful in every respect than the whole 
thirteen Colonies at the time the immortal fifty-six signed that 
instrument. 

The wilderness extending almost from the Atlantic to the 
Pacific Ocean has disappeared and in its stead are human habitations 
— cities, towns, villages, churches, school-houses and farms, 
with their broad fields to-day, waving in God's sunlight, with their 
rich harvests of golden grain. 

The merciless savages, who in the bloody struggle that followed 
the Declaration of Independence, were employed by our British 
relations to scalp old men, helpless women and innocent children 
at the price of a pound each, have so far disappeared that their 
numbers no longer excite apprehensions of trouble or danger. 

Religious liberty is everywhere protected by law — whether in 
the Capitol, the prison, the poor-house, the church or the domicil 
— and yet there is entire separation between Church and State, 
enforced by Constitutional provision. 

Here is a school system unsurpassed, and a general intelligence 
among the people nowhere equalled on the face of the earth. 



ORATION — HON. GEO. L. CONVERSE. 613 

Instead of thirteen Colonies afflicted with African slavery 
for which they were in no wise responsible, they would observe 
four millions of colored men to-day rejoicing in a new found 
freedom, and with us, heart and soul, revering the memories of the 
gallant dead, and celebrating this glorious day, with processions 
and banners and shouts and songs. Who will say now, that the 
seed sown one hundred years ago did not in due and proper time 
germinate and bring forth in God's providence its natural fruit? 
Is not the present condition of affairs the logical sequence of 
Independence Day ? 

They would find here the graces of the Christian religion 
cultivated and practiced, and a purity in both public and private 
life nowhere else to be found on the face of the earth, politicians 
to the contrary notwithstanding. 

Woman here is more favored, occupies a higher place in 
creation, and breathes a purer moral atmosphere than in any other 
land. 

They would find this continent free from European domination 
and influence, and each State, sovereignty and Government on 
it, making greater, or less progress in our peculiar civilization, 
under the influence and example of the United States. 

The fact is, free government is indigenous in American soil ; 
it flourishes here, and under intelligent cultivation yields a 
bountiful harvest of happiness. Monarchy, on our soil, is of 
sickly growth and cannot be successfully cultivated. Louis 
Napoleon's experiment with Maximilian proves this, and should 
the Spanish Prince make ' a like attempt he will share the 
same fate with the Austrian. 

Instead of slow sailing vessels, they would find on river, 
lake and ocean the swift and powerful steamer ; instead of 
common wagon transports, long trains of cars loaded with 
passengers and freight, flying with the speed of the wind from 
one side of the continent to the other ; instead of the post-rider, 
the lightning has been harnessed and conveys intelligence beneath 
the ocean and to the most distant parts of the globe with the 
swiftness of thought. The mind is lost in wonder and amaze- 
ment in contemplating the progress of the human race in a single 
century under free government. 



614 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

And, finally, as they turn their immortal eyes toward the City 
of Brotherly Love — the birth-place of American freedom — on 
this her natal day, what sublime emotions must agitate the 
breast of these heroes and patriots, as they witness all the nations 
of the earth assembled in that place dedicated to freedom under 
the very shadow of Independence Mall, in friendly emulation, 
celebrating the triumphs of peace, each nation under its own flag, 
and all under the ample and protecting folds of the stars and 
stripes. Truly peace hath her victories and her triumphs as well 
as war. But what warrior, amongst the most successful the 
world has ever produced, has been able to prolong his continuous 
triumph beyond a single week ? But peace here hath her daily 
triumphal procession of vast multitudes, each day differing from 
that which preceded it, marching through her crystal palace 
for the period of half a year. Her triumphs are attended with 
an expense of untold millions of dollars, and conducted with 
a magnificence and splendor the world has never seen before, but, 
under the inspiration of freedom and popular government, oft 
shall see again. 

There are no royal prisoners chained to triumphal car, to 
grace the occasion ; there are no treasures and spoil stained with 
human blood to give it magnificence and splendor, but here 
is the wealth of the mine, the farm, the workshop, the studio, 
and the school in orderly arrangement and endless profusion, from 
all parts of the habitable globe. The city is rightly named. 
This is now the "city of the soul." Gentle peace, under the 
banner of freedom, here 

" Hath thus amassed 
All treasures, all delights, that eye or ear, 

Heart, soul could seek, tongue ask ; away with words. Draw near. 
Admire, exult, despise, laugh, weep, for here 
There' is such matter for all feeling." 

Can there be any doubt that the nations are profiting by our 
example ? If the world's progress during the last century is 
any criterion, what will he the condition of affairs at the end 
of the next? In another century there will be from sixty to 
a hundred sovereign States. Our Southern border will be 



ORATION HON. GEO. L. CONVERSE. 615 

the isthmus ; our Northern, the frozen seas ; and East and West 
our flag will float far enough to cover with its protecting 
shadow the adjacent islands. 

In other centuries, perhaps, this whole continent will he locked 
in the embrace of one common brotherhood of States. Under 
the representative principle and home rule, the Union is capable 
of great expansion, and could with time and education be made 
to embrace the continent. American citizenship shall everywhere 
be a panoply and a shield to its possessor. Our population may 
become as countless as the sands on the sea shore, but science 
shall unlock to them the secret storehouse of wealth. The earth 
under their manipulation shall yield her products more abundantly 
and with greater regularity. Science shall discover to them 
the door that leads to the rich deposits of silver, gold and precious 
stones. By its aid, her commerce may float in the air above 
the mountain top and the cloud, or be guided on glistening 
rails beneath the ocean. The arcana of nature will be explored 
— the air, the water — the very elements shall give up their secret 
treasures of power and of motion, at the command of science, 
to the sous of freedom. 

In the march of coming generations, the thundering tread 
of American freemen, whether in war or in peace, shall echo 
from the distant ocean shore on either side, and be heard and 
heeded alike by Caucasian and Mongolian. 

In the clash of ideas and political principles sure to come in the 
distant future, America will represent one type of civilization, 
with free and popular government, while Russia, having swallowed 
the lesser kingdoms around or combining with them, shall repre- 
sent the other, with centralization and despotism. 

When the tvfo systems meet, as meet they will, it will be 
in the shock of dreadful war, and like the meeting of two clouds 
surcharged with the elements of storm, the land will be deluged in 
blood. The sons of freedom shall prevail, and out of the con- 
flict shall arise the sweet and lasting peace that shall characterize 
the millennium. 

This picture is not altogether imaginary. The ancient prophets 
have prophesied concerning this land and this government of ours, 
and have recorded their prophecy in the sacred scriptures. This 



610 OUK NATIONAL JUJilLEE. 

is the restored Israel spoken of by the prophets. This is the 
stone cut out of the mountain without hands. This is the male 
child born of the woman that fled into the wilderness. These 
are the waiting isles — in part peopled from the North and the 
the West, and from the land of Sinnim, foretold by the prophet 
Isaiah. 

This is the land between two seas East and West — the land 
that hath always been waste — the land whose people were 
gathered out of the nations of the earth — the land where the 
stranger hath an inheritance — the land of unwalled towns and 
villages — the land of broad rivers and streams which Ezekiel saw. 

It was of this free people and this glorious republic that 
Jeremiah prophesied when he speaks of a people who gather 
themselves together and appoint unto themselves one head — a 
people whose nobles shall be of themselves, and whose governors 
shall proceed from the midst of them. 

Who does not love this glorious republic better because it is 
mentioned in the Scriptures ? Thus it is, religion and patriotism 
combine, with exultation, gratitude and hope to swell the flood oi 
emotions that sweep over our souls this day. 



CENTENNIAL ADDRESS. 

AN ADDRESS BY HON. HARVEY RICE, PRESIDENT OF 
THE DAY. 

DELIVERED AT CLEVELAND, OHIO, JULY 4TH, 1876. 

Friends and Fellow-Citizens — We have met to commem- 
orate the centennial of our national existence. One hundred years 
ago an infant republic was born on this continent whose first ut- 
terances announced to the world the Declaration of her Indepen- 
dence. Marvelous as it may seem, she weaned herself from the 
nursing cares of her mother on the day of her birth. 

It was an auspicious day for her and for this world. The 
"star of empire " appeared in the "West, stood over her cradle, and 
shed upon her brow its genial radiance and inspiring influence. 
Conscious of her native strength and the justice of her cause, she 
flung her star-spangled banner to the breeze, and when came the 
" tug of war," the God of battles gave her the victory. 

And now, having grown within a single century to be a mighty 
republic, may she still live on, pure as at her birth, and, still grow- 
ing in strength, make the coining centuries of the great future her 
stepping stones to advancement, and by her civilizing and Chris- 
tianizing influence elevate the nations of the earth to the level of 
a common brotherhood, and thus bequeath to all mankind the full 
and free enjoyment of equal rights and equal liberties. And 
may God grant that her star-spangled banner shall henceforth and 
forever float in triumph 

" O'er the land of the free and the home of the braTe." 



DEMOCKACY IN DANGER. 

AN ADDRESS BY REV. R. A. HOLLAND. 

DELIVERED IN CHRIST CHURCH, ST. LOUIS, MISSOURI. 

There are two kinds of patriotism — one of instinct, the other 
of reason. Patriotism of instinct is attachment to a spot of 
ground, familiar scenes, inherited customs, a geographical name. 
It is the love of the fox for his hole, the fowl for her nest. In 
war a sort of magic, mobilizing men into instant armies reckless of 
death, in peace it encourages abuses and invites usurpations by 
defending every evil that may be done in the sacred name of 
country. " My country, right or wrong," is its confession of faith, 
and for fetish it worships a flag. 

Not in this spirit have we assembled to-day to celebrate the 
hundredth anniversary of our republic, but rather in the spirit of 
that more rational patriotism which loving truth, right, humanity 
first, loves country only in so far as these supreme ideas are or 
may be organized and administered in its policy. For govern- 
ments are not an end to themselves, but means for achieving an 
end which is higher, broader, more enduring. They exist for man, 
not man for them. The method by which he attempts to realize 
social aims, they change in form as one form after another fails of 
its task. Even if the form should be perfect in its adaptation to 
a particular stage of national growth. The continuance of such 
growth would by and bye require a change to suit 

A. piirwcuijir 9 

stage of 11a- its enlarging needs. And whatever mav be the fate 

tional growth. ..,.?,,. 

of individual nations, whether or not their law is to 
mature and decay, the growth of the race is constant and im- 
parts its gains of experience to all institutions that are vital 
enough to assimilate them. Accordingly, experiments in govern- 
ment have not been without an order of succession and a cer- 
tain utility of failure. Failure warns against exact repetition. 
Men are not likely to go back to feudalism or despotism, the reigu 



ADDRESS REV. It. A. HOLLAND. CIO 

of one or of a few, for the models of future society. When only 
the few had knowledge and wealth, it was well that the few should 
govern ; but knowledge has now become common, and wealth 
diffuse. There are no longer in our civilization lord and vassal 
separated by an impassable gulf. The gulf has been closed by a 
middle class nobler in intelligence and richer in estate than baron- 
age. The rabble, as it was once called, has by co-operation, risen 
likewise in consciousness of power and stands before wealth and 
rank, with bare arms that on provocation might toss them both out 
of its way. One would have to bind one's eyes with fold on fold 
of prejudice not to see that the tendency of these changes is 
towards democracy; that, indeed, by peoples who have graduated 
from a state of pupilage and know their manhood, no other kind of 
government will be tolerated long unless in evident transition 
towards democracy. 

Within the present century we have seen Great Britain admit 
multitudes to a partnership in her crown, Spain elect a monarch 
who rules by popular consent, Italy unite under a sceptre wrought 
of suffrage and stronger than the keys of St. Peter, Russia eman- 
cipate her serfs, and France stunned by the horror of the first 
revolution and reeling between throne and tribune as if unable to 
collect her senses, finally ascend the latter with firm step and pro- 
claim the republic of peace. 

And still the tendency of governments sets in the same direc- 
tion, and gains impetuosity as it goes. Men have not to be 
harangued any more about liberty, equality, fraternity. 
These ere-while abstractions are household words ofpeace. UbUc 
defined by the heart. Liberty — the right of every 
man to be himself so far as his self-hood does not trench upon the 
same right in others ; equality — the level on which all men stand 
before the law, none born to rank or rule, each exercising the 
authority he obeys, sovereign that he may be subject, and subject 
that he may be sovereign ; and fraternity, which is identity of 
interest, abolition of caste, every man being as jealous of the rights 
of every other as of his own, and the strongest and wisest willing 
to bear vexation or hardship that the weak and ignorant may 
qualify themselves for self-government by the use of rights which, 
sven when least understood, foster self-respect, independence and 



620 OUU NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

a lively concern in affairs of state, and thus serve for a moral 
education. 

The question is not whether democracy he the cheapest form of 
government, or the shrewdest, or the most facile, or the stoutest 
against inner or outer foes — in all which qualities superiority may 
be conceded to despotism ; but whether in spite of extravagance, 
blunders, caprice, it is not the best for man as man, worth its excess 
of cost in money and toil and sense of danger. 

Did monarchy impose small taxes, stimulate trade, render speedy 
and sure the process of law and lighten every load of government, 
the government would still weigh heavy on a shoulder that felt 
itself the bearer of a compulsory benefit. There is nothing in the 
power of government to bestow so precious as man's right to rule 
himself — a right which democracy simply admits and leaves free 
to take whatever form it will. Better manhood with liberty, 
though liberty run risk of license ; better manhood with equality, 
though equality sway to transcient rule of ignorance and vice; 
better manhood with fraternity, though fraternity may run for 
awhile into the clannish hate and envy of the commune ; better 
universal suffrage with all its drawbacks and dangers than any 
limitation of it that bars the birthright of the soul. Sooner or 
later, bv the verv discipline which their errors, with 

Bars the birth- J J . r •111*1. 

right of the the consequent sufferings, enforce, men will learn the 
art of self-government ; and the secret of that art 
when learned, will be little else than the wiser head and warmer 
heart and more helpful hand of a developed manhood. 

Nor is it mere moony vision or spread-eagle rapture to anticipate 
a democracy as vast as civilization. Be it for good or evil, the 
peoples will not rest until they have tried the experiment and tried 
it more than once. The might is theirs and they will exert it ; 
theirs is the right and it will justify the utmost exertion to throw 
off the yoke of titled accidents ; and if progress be the law of 
humanity, as it is of all things else, might and right must grow 
with time into graces of unity, peace and concord. Otherwise 
humanity is a predestined failure, and the ethics of its hope a lie. 

For what else is democracy in the purest notion of it but the 
religion of politics. It means faith in man and in his destiny ; it 
means that there is more of irood than of evil in his nature, and 



ADDRESS REV. R. A. HOLLAND. 621 

that in the conflict between them the good shall triumph at last ; it 
means the supremacy of conscience over force, and of reason over 
prejudice and passion ; it means that men shall love their neigh- 
bors as themselves, and so adopts the golden rule for a civil con- 
stitution and charters the brotherhood of the race. 

This, I say, is the ideal state of society. Perhaps not to be 
attained for ages, it will yet be steadily approached by the ad- 
vance of civilization. The possibility of its attainment is bound 
up with no particular form of administration. Different forms 
may be wanted for different people, all forms will change with 
changing epochs ; but throughout differences and changes the spirit 
of democracy shall live and wax strong, healing whatever suspi- 
cions, discords, strifes afflict the body that grows meanwhile 
towards the fulness of the stature of a perfect man. 

But why these truisms about democracy ? For truisms they 
appear to the American mind. Is it necessary after a hundred 
years of democratic government to argue its utility and prophesy 
its permanence ? Yes, and therein is the saddest reflection of our 
Centennial holiday. Time was when the American people be- 
lieved in their institutions as an article of religion. To doubt their 
beneficence was heresy, as to fear for their perpetuity was treason. 
Such faith may have been child-like, but it was the substance of 
things hoped for. Its simplicity was justified by the rare auspices 
under .which the experiment of free government began. There 
were no old customs and traditions to cast away. The nation was 
new-born. No enemies threatened its young life. Oceans made 
a moat between it and foreign harm. A continent gave it room 
and its forthgoings of enterprise were but an athlete's pastime. 
It had a presentiment of high destiny, of some august mission to 
the world, and was exalted by that day-dream above everything 
mean and sordid. Here, it said, in this new world of nature, there 
shall be a new world of society. The old world is faint under 
oppression. The heaped up evil of a thousand years lies upon its 
breast, like -ZEtna on Enceladus. and the Titan' 1 unrest only 
heaves the mountain it cannot remove. Let ul begin afresh. 
Let the oppressed of every land come hither for asylum. There 
is room enough and to spare. There shall be no distinction of 
class, no alienage of race, no barrier of religion. As one people 



622 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

equal and free, we will enact our own laws, elect our own officers 
to administer them in trust and call no man master. The old 
world looking hither shall see our glory and wonder as at a sunrise 
in the west. 

It was the invitation of youth, but there were many 
the wTst 186 ln y° ul 'g nearts fcltiat heeded it. They flocked hither on 
the winds. Cities were extemporized to shelter them, 
states multiplied by a kind of segmentation, habitations sprang up 
in the desert, and the wilderness and the solitary places were glad 
with surprise. Rough, perhaps, the people were, unsophisticated 
and grotesquely proud of their prerogative, but they had virtues 
which more than offset these defects. They were as devoted to 
the principles of their government as the Parsee to his sacred lire. 
These principles they talked over by fireside and church door, on 
the road, behind the plough, in the smithy and across the counter. 
"With heads bowed over the published reports of Congress, they 
listened to every word of its debates attentively enough to learn 
them almost by heart. By their very rights they were apprenticed 
to statesmanship, and the statesmanship they studied was that of 
Hamilton, of Jefferson, of Adams, of Madison, of Webster, of 
Calhoun — prophets whose mantle caught by no worthy successor, 
has fallen in the dust. Those were the poetic days of our politics ; 
bribery, stock-jobbing and embezzlement were unknown in high 
places ; the least suspicion soiled a public name ; official honor 
was as delicate and sensitive as virginity. Then the benefits of 
democracy were a truism, and only discoursed of in panegyric. 

But those days are no more. What contributed most to pre- 
serve their purity was the freshness of the ideas which engaged 
the minds of the people and which the people were striving to 
embody in their institutions. A great idea transfigures whatever 
it informs, whether an individual, a state or a church, and turns 
the coarsest tissue of organism through which it shines into radi- 
ance "exceeding white as snow." And such ideas are involved in 
the questions that engrossed the first thought of the nation. Was 
it to be a mere fasces of states, bound about an axe of common 
defence, or a nation indeed ? Was it to be self-blockaded for the 
protection of a guild, or open in trade to the world that its citizens 
might have .the benefit of the world's competition in its markets ? 



ADDRESS — REV. R. A. HOLLAND. G 

"Was it to be restricted or universal in suffrage ? The answers to 
these questions created parties, but they were parties breathed into 
by earnest thought and by such breath of life made living souls. 
They had a faith and a purpose, and sought to fix that faith and 
purpose in the framework of the republic. But the issues that 
divided them are now settled or ignored ; the great ideas that 
organized them have passed from thought into fact, or oblivion ; 
still the parties remain — remain without a soul. How can they be 
other than corrupt when they are but the carcasses of themselves. 
They use the old names for purposes wholly strange to their sig- 
nificance. They contend without hostility of opinion. They pre- 
sent the same statement of principles, each trying, however, in the 
artifice of it to construct the more tempting trap for votes. Both 
are in favor of economical government, of low tariff, of correcting 
abuses, of kindness to widows and orphans of dead soldiers, and of 
putting everybody in a good humor. Both avoid any declaration 
of belief that might cause a change of lines and the disruption of 
their compact and subservient organizations — organizations so 
compact and subservient as to belong to a set of men called bosses, 
who make a business of driving and trading their 

herded souls, which are too dull to hear the crack of a set of men 

called bosses. 

the caucus whip or too tame to bolt from under it. 

Every honest man must feel, even if he does not acknowl- 
edge, the dishonesty of such organizations, and whenever 
felt, and not renounced, that dishonesty is tainting his 
character. Hence the prevalent compromise between partisan- 
ship and virtue — a partition put into the conscience that one side 
may be kept clean for the ordinary duties of life, while the other 
is fouled by the use of party. Violation of the ballot is con* 
demned in the abstract as an assault on the republic's life, but 
covered up or excused when done for "the sake of one's party* 
Fraud is an abomination, and ought to be tied hand and foot and 
thrown into jail, but may be given a softer name and treated 
more tenderly — possibly allowed to escape and honored for its 
zeal when acting as the agent of one's party. 

Nevertheless, dishonesty is dishonesty ; dishonesty with one's 
self glides easily into dishonesty with others — dishonesty of alle- 
giance into dishonesty of broken trusts. It is no worse to steal the 



624 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

people's money than to steal their votes. If party can connive at 
one, party may apologize for the other and defend it. Hence 
theft with arms elbow-deep in the treasury of cities ; theft shaking 
empty the overturned coffers of states ; theft of hard-earned 
savings from freedmen ; theft of dole from half-naked and half- 
starved Indians ; theft of wages from soldiers on the frontier ; 
theft from the graves of the nation's heroic dead ; theft of revenue, 
of customs, of appropriations to lay out public grounds, erect 
public edifices, build ships of war, carry mails, pave iron thorough- 
fares across the continent ; theft promoted in the name of 
civil-service reform, and given charge of the nation's exchequer. 
And why not ? Who cares but the opposite party, itself as slow to 
discover and as quick to condone the sins of its own adher- 
ents. No tremendous shock, no vast flaming up of indignation 
follows the exposure of the wholesale roguery. Certainly not ; the 

roughs are high-toned rogues. Gentlemen of the first- 
roiues OTled class ; eminent respectabilities — judges, are they, and 

governors and generals, and chairmen of congressional 
committees and senators, and ambassadors to foreign courts, and 
advisers of the president's council, who have stolen handsomely 
by tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands, and not like 
a low-bred felon. Let them off, your excellency, for the sake 
of their wives who have not hoarded the ill-gotten gain selfishly, 
but turned it into diamonds to decorate the drawing-rooms of 
the capital. Mollify their sentence, your honor, in consideration 
of their wealth, which should have kept them above temptation ; 
their age, which, sinned not from impulse, but with veteran 
deliberation ; their influence, which spreads all the further the 
corruption of a bad example. Has not justice ever demanded 
that punishment should be severe according to the distress, 
inexperience and obscurity of the culprit ? And you, gentlemen 
of the jury, acquit, by all means acquit ; innocent or guilty, still 
acquit any whom to convict would be to graze, if not to 
pierce, the head of the nation. 

I trust that those who hear me will not think that in these 
words I wish to aid one party by branding the other. I am 
not a partisan. I have never cast a partisan vote. I have no 
preference for Democrat or Republican, as such. I have no 



ADDRESS — REV. R. A. HOLLAND. 625 

reason to believe that the party now out of power would with- 
stand the temptations of fifteen years of absolute sway more 
successfully than the party has done which still controls the 
emoluments of the administration. Both parties seem to me 
notionless, without aim beyond the getting or keeping of power 
by any sort of clap-trap, and therefore, morally dead, their 
activity being the activity of rot. What boots the promise of 
reform from men who, to fulfil that promise, must padlock their 
own hands ? The pledges of a national convention, are they worth 
any more than the pledges of such men ? Is not the conven- 
tion itself a huge trick ? Pretending to represent the people, 
it represents, with few exceptions, a class whom the people ought 
to detest as mountebanks. The primary meetings which elect 
the delegates are packed by bummers, who take their cue from 
local bosses, and the delegates nearly all are office-holders or 
office-seekers, who in turn are wire-pulled by a clique that 
prepares their work in advance, and prompts every detail of it. 
Before the convention assembles, traffic has been going on 
between aspirants and those who have part in the privilege of 
nomination ; if not traffic in coin, traffic in promises of office, for 
promises of support, which is bribery as real and as gross. When 
the convention organizes, it organizes for any other object than to 
deliberate and choose as becomes the pretending representatives of 
half a nation ; deliberation is confounded by hired shouts and 
hisses of clans that strive for their respective favorites, and 
choice waits impatient on a signal to desert its real favorite 
for the ranks of the winning chief. And this body of politicians 
who hope by electing their candidate for the presidency to elect 
themselves to a share of his patronage, this body which is spurious 
from its earliest conception in a ward-meeting to its expiring 
resolve, would cozen the people again and again with oaths of 
reform. Reform, indeed ! Will it reform itself out of existence ? 
When votes are not sought for the maintenance of a principle, 
what other motive can explain the zeal, the expense, the 
labor with which they are solicited ? Not the excellence of 
candidates, since candidates are never chosen for their excellence, 
but for their availability in pushing the ends of party ; not the 
enthusiasm of the party's rank ami file, which are apathetic 



620 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

until uproused by the appeals of interested leaders who urge 
on the canvass. What then but greed for place, power, perqui- 
sites ? — the fenris wolf whose jaws it is the first duty of reform to 
gag and split asunder ! Reform, therefore, is impossible by parties 
so long as they exist in their present organizations, and the civil 
service of the country is labelled with the motto : " To the victors 
belong the spoils." 

In this service are thousands of offices that have no relation to 
questions of civil polity. The assessment and col- 

" To the victors , . „ , , . - 1 

belong the lection of taxes, the stamping of money, award ot 
patents, distribution of mails, arrest, prosecution and 
punishment of criminals, are simply wheels and bands in the 
machinery of government, and should move the same under 
all changes of administration. As well dismiss all notaries public, 
or teachers of public schools, or officers of the army with every 
turn of an election as the persons engaged in this equally routine 
work. Yet, however faithful and expert, they must retire 
when another party than that to which they belong marches 
into possession of the nation's offices, for " to the victors 
belong the spoils." Even while in office they hang there on the 
pleasure of their patron, and may be cut off at any hour; com- 
petency counts for nothing unless it be competency to further his 
schemes. Flunkeyism is the most profitable type of character. 
Salaries are paid less for service to the country than for service 
against it. These salaries are then docked by the dispensers 
of patronage, who chastise complaint with forfeiture of the office 
itself; and so the nation's work is neglected, her interests betrayed, 
her revenues squandered, her industry stricken prone that " to the 
victors may belong the spoils." 

Said one high in position, who lost his official hand by thrusting 
it into this soul-grinding machine to check some of its operations : 
" No sooner is a man in place than his rivals or enemies are 
on his track, ready to prove that he was the most unfit person 
that could be chosen, and that the party will be utterly demoral- 
ized if he is not instantly removed and his place given to another. 
If a month or two were all that is wasted in this employment 
it would be bad enough ; but the truth is, that by far the larger 
part of the time of the president and all the members of his 



ADDRESS — REV. R. A. HOLLAND. 027 

cabinet is occupied by this worse than useless drudgeiy during 
the whole term of his office, and it forms literally and abso- 
lutely the staple of their work. It is, therefore, no figure of 
speech to say that administering the government means the 
distribution of its offices, and that its diplomacy, finance, military, 
naval and internal administration are the minor affairs which the 
.settled policy of the country has relegated to such odds and ends 
>f tims as may be snatched from the greater cares of office." 
— Hon. J. D. Cox. 

Think you then that a party, of its own free will and 
accord, will surrender the hope of these spoils so dear, which 
hope alone holds it together from commander-in-chief down to 
the corporal of the curbstone who drums up recruits with a dram 
of whiskey? No. Never will that hope be surrendered except 
at the demand of the people breaking loose from party and 
bent on deliverance from wrongs which have been suffered 
until they become insufferable. And the man who leads that 
uprising to victory, will save the republic from a greater peril 
than threatened its life in civil war. Has the hour come, and the 
man ? 

But there is another danger to Democracy. The country has 
grown rich with almost magic suddenness. Its great 

..... .... . Another dan- 

extent of sou, inexhaustible mineral resources, uni- «rr t» Democ- 
versal opportunity of profitable labor, together with 
the rapid influx of population which these attract, have made the 
pursuit of wealth a mania. 

It is as if money had been showering from the sky, and men 
had postponed all other thought than to pick up a fortune before 
the miracle was over. Thus, the very ease with which the repub- 
lic prospered has been an injury to its permanent welfare ; since 
that ease gave quiet to patriotism and excited avarice. As a result 
avarice is to-day the ruling passion of Americans. More with us 
than with any other nation does money regulate the scale of 
society. Money is our rank, our morality ; in the hand hushes all 
inquest as to how it was got — commands like omnipotence. In 
our haste to be rich honest work for moderate wages is despised. 
Speculation runs mad. The activity of commerce exceeds its 
material. Values are fictitious and fluctuate every hour. Busb 



628 OUR. NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

ness gambles in contingencies and banks heavily on the future. 
Mutual sense of risk in all transactions tenders off-hand compromise 
to debt, and debt freed from its awe of obligation rushes into 
extravagance ; and extravagance is the quicksand where through 
contracts made not to be kept, mendacity, disregard of the rights 
of others, manhood, sinks towards utter loss of self-respect, at once 
its death and burial. But self-respect is the very spirit of democ- 
racy, and the spirit gone, nothing remains but the rule of the mob ; 
insanest of tyrannies ! Again, out of our haste to be rich have 
risen numerous corporations which mass the capital of many in 
one giant stock with a giant's grasp. By such combinations the 
evils of individual avarice are aggravated. Division of responsi- 
bility among the members of a board and the impersonal nature 
of their operations renders them more unscrupulous and fearless 
than they each would be in a solitary enterprise. Having no 
existence but for money-making, the corporation regards all other 
existence from that stand-point. Soulless itself, it is without 
faculty to recognize the soul. It looks upon laws as commodities 
and those who enact and execute them as commission-brokers. 
Life, labor, commerce, art, politics and religion seem to it various 
phases of a melee whose prizes are for the strongest, and the cor- 
poration is the strongest. Individuals must die, corporations may 
be perpetual. Individual estates must dissolve and mingle again 
with the current wealth ; the estates of corporations may stay 
entire and increase age after age. Already among us are some 
of these giants, yet in their youth, that own cities, hold liens on 
States, step off their acreage to the width of a continent and wear 
county-courts, common councils, legislatures and congress on their 
ring fingers. Compare their bold predatory course with the halt 
and blind policy of the parties which have charge of our institu- 
tions and answer if their continued aggrandizement does not bode 
ill to democracy. 

But there is a more serious danger yet. Old parties may cor- 
rupt, but their corruption is decay, and from that decay new 
parties will spring into life ; corporations, while buying 
&mgeryet! 0UB special legislation, aid in developing the wealth of the 
country and are sure to incur popular wrath whenever 
their exorbitancies gall — provided the ballot remains pure and 



ADDRESS — REV. R. A. HOLLAND. 629 

efficient. It is by the ballot that the people think, repent, resolve, 
and carry their mind into conduct. They may think slowly, but 
by errors they will at last learn truth ; they may repent late, but 
the later the repentance the sorer the conscious need of reform ; 
they may hesitate long to act, but the hesitation sharpens the exi 
gency that will spur them to swifter and more irresistible action 
when they start. Thus the ballot may educate them through evil 
into habits of forethought, of vigilance, of prompt exertion. But 
u ithout purity and efficiency the ballot is worse than useless — it is 
an imposition. The people do not govern themselves, but are 
governed by unknown usurpers. Safer a Cassar crowned for ser- 
vices to the state, or the weak heir of a name constrained by the 
glare of a kingdom's eyes — 

" That fierce light which beats upon a throne, 
And blackens every blot — " 

Than these despots of the dark. What the ark was to Israel the 
ballot should be to the American people, and their love of liberty 
should act like a divine presence to palsy the hand that profanea 
it. Nor is such profanation menaced, as some apprehend, chiefly 
by ignorance. Ignorance may be reverent and cautious as well as 
rash. Besides, who are the ignorant of a nation ? Capitalists are 
ignorant as well as workingmen. Students of one branch of 
knowledge are ignorant of many other branches. The most learned 
think of themselves as learners still. There are no standard text- 
books of government, acquaintance with which may be demanded 
as a necessary qualification for suffrage, nor is any distinction valid 
between those who hold different theories of government and those 
who hold no theory at all. It was Milton who rebuked the gram- 
marian, and said : " Whosoever he be, though from among the 
dregs of the common people, that you are so keen upon, whoso- 
ever, I say, has sucked in this principle, that he was not born for 
his prince but for God and his country — he deserves the reputation 
of a learned and an honest and a wise man more, and is of greater 
use in the world, than yourself." Moreover in the people wise 
and unwise are mixed together, and the difference between them 
melts away with time. The philosophy of one generation is the 
proverb of the next. Before Adam Smith had been dead a cen« 



630 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

fairy there was a realm of Adam Smiths. A word of fire went 
forth from a private citizen of Boston, and a score of years after- 
wards, he heard its effect in the cannonade of armies and the clank 
of a million falling chains. 

No, the danger to democracy is not so much in ignorance as in 
indifference. The poor man loves his franchise for the sense of 
equality with the richest which it confers, and the villain is as sure 
to vote as a hawker to cry his wares. It is the men of culture who 
least esteem the privilege and therefore are most apt to neglect it. 
They feel degraded in an occupation which cheapens their culture 
to a par with boorishness and venality. Considering themselves 
the few, and the base and unlettered the many, they think of the 
rule of the majority as inevitably a rule of ignorance and vice — 
the inversion of social order. And their despondency would be 
reasonable, their indifference blameless, if the functions and duties 
of the ballot were confined to the mere depositing of votes. But 
the ballot includes all the mental and moral forces that enlighten 
the judgment and influence the will of the voters. In that work 
the few are not necessarily a minority ; intelligence has sway equal 
to its worth, and character is more than a multitude. Howbeit, 
character needs time to count itself. The fool can say his folly in 
a minute, but the speech of understanding is slow. By acting on 
these principles in certain crises of state, character has demonstra- 
ted its supremacy. But why wait for crises to do what might be 
better done and with less fatigue by steady work ? Is it because 
such work seems a disproportionate task for the few ? Nature 
everywhere joins rare responsibility to rare endowments. The 
most favored citizens are by their very condition detailed to stand 
guard for the rest. They must watch while others sleep. Tyran- 
ny is an insidious thing, and it is for them to detect its crawl in 
the slightest abuse and transfix the snake before it raises its head 
to strike. When majorities begin to corrupt, they should be the 
first to revolt, and by concerted action baffle the hope of plunder 
and confuse the discipline of party. The wretch 
of a Suiider h ° pe wll ° interferes with the ballot they should lynch 
with their scorn as one who had attempted to gar- 
rote Liberty herself for debauchment. 

Gentlemei, churchmen, does your conscience acknowledge the 



ADDRESS REV. R. A. HOLLAND. 631 

high obligation ? Thou, as men of conscience, to your duty. The 
dilletantism that pleads refinement in a neglect of duty is cowardice, 
as mean a vice as any that begrimes the riff-raff it would shun. 
Wherever citizens meet to discuss public interests, you should be 
seen and heard and felt. Wherever place hunters plot in caucus 
against the commonwealth you should not shrink from going to 
spy out their mischief that it may be brought to judgment. Least 
of all can you afford to countenance or even seem to wink at the 
pettiest falsehood, or fraud, or meddling with the perfect candor of 
the people's choice. And when the hour of darkness falls and 
men's hearts are failing them for fear — who, if not you, shall be 
the forlorn hope of the republic and rally its discouraged forces ? 
Liberty has man}' sons and loves them all ; but some know her 
only by the look of cheer that blesses their toil, and others by the 
hand-clasp that has led them into opportunities of wealth and 
honor ; and others by her sentinel step around the altar-places of 
the soul, its love of truth and freedom of worship ; while to a few 
she has confided her whole heart, her good intentions to men, and 
anxiety lest men should mar their fulfilment by distrust, and all 
her lifelong dream of a perfect race. Who of these sons should 
love her most ? And if these who should love most because most 
trusted with love, hetray, is there any treason that can be likened 
to their treachery ? 

Such are some of the most serious dangers that confront Amer- 
ican democracy in its hundredth year. Doubtless they have been 
precipitated and made worse by the war through which it has re- 
cently passed. All war is savagery, and to prosecute war, civil- 
ization must forget its moral achievements and return to the 
instincts of the forest and jungle. However righteous the aim of 
a war, in the fury of strife, it is remembered only to license these 
instincts which, as soon as let slip, speed to havoc. Since, not the 
army only, but the whole people fight, we may expect, if the fight 
is protracted, that the savage instincts of the people will run so 
wild that morality cannot readily call them back into leash. Fero- 
city, deceit and lust of pillage having survived the occasion that 
allowed them, will henceforth seek their prey by the stratagems of 
peace. Defects of government they will take to for cover and 
follow the scent of an evil tendency as a jackal noses out distant 



632 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

carrion. Thus, while the late war revealed the nation's strength, 
it likewise revealed or prepared the revelation of the mil ion's 
weakness. That strength is the devotion of the masses to the 
great ideas embodied in our constitution ; that weakness is the 
ease with which the masses are duped by a catch-word of party to 
intrust their government to men who filch its treasures or waste, 
them in subsidizing corporations which grow fat only to want 
more, and which in order to get all they want would rob the people 
of their last liberty, a state of things already so bad that the better 
class of citizens have begun to lose heart, and by despondency are 
abetting the evil they deplore. Nevertheless, melancholy as the 
situation is, I see no cause to despair. The weakness of Democ- 
racy seems to me the weakness of strength. Dangers beset all 
governments and will beset them until men are perfect, and then 
government shall no longer be needed. 

We are not in the millennium that we should throw up our hands 
at si<rht of wrons: and marvel how it chanced here. Our world is 
thick with wrongs, and out of them government is to be built the 
best it may, so placing the tendency of one wrong against the ten- 
dency of another as to make, if possible, a fair proportion and a 
staunch support like the stones of an arch. The only question is, 
have we the architect in Democracy ? T believe we have. I 
believe that the pressure of abuses will render the people more 
compact. Resistance, even now, is getting dense among us ; par- 
ties do not hold the elements of it apart as hitherto. There are 
enough who desire reform to compel it if they were only pressed 
into unity of action. The pressure will come, and, with it, the 
reform. 

Moreover a new power has just appeared among the people ami 
reinforced their wisdom and will. It is the independent press. 
Until yesterday the daily press was the mouthpiece of party. Living 
on patronage it had to fawn. But wealth gives independence, and 
thus it happens that the ablest and most extensively read news- 
papers are those which have broken their alliance with party. They 
stand apart, unsparing critics of mischievous legislation and mal- 
feasance of office. Parties dread their censure, and to corrupt poli- 
ticians it is worse than indictment. Their eye is everywhere and 
their YPice fills the land,, Many an official whose cn'rae is still 



ADDRESS — REV. R. A. HOLLAND. 633 

secret, sleeps uncomfortably in the fear that some morning he will 
wake up to hear them shouting his name from city to city with 
a curse. They may yet prove the people's trump of doom. 

All in all, the republic has reason to be proud of its hundred 
years. For a hundred years the test of democracy, in spite of draw- 
backs and dangers, has been favorable. For a hundred years it 
has shown as much discretion as have contemporary monarchies in 
dealing with social problems. For a hundred years, with now and 
then a financial famine such as visits all governments alike, it has 
rivalled the richest empires in prosperity. And should the outward 
form of it perish at sunset of this anniversary, the example of 
democracy working out a hundred years of such order, energy, 
accumulation of wealth, and union of diverse interests in fealty to a 
sublime moral sentiment, has spoiled the race for any other form of 
government. It has insured beyond doubt that though in the end 
it should fail here, the experiment will be tried elsewhere, and until 
by an education of trials men have learned to maintain their own 
and respect each other's rights. 

But I cannot suffer myself to think of failure. The day forbids 
it, and points to good omens under the cloud. The republic is 
more closely knit than ever before. The wound of sectional wai- 
ls well nigh healed. The flowers that fall oh graves every spring 
from hands impartial to the blue and the gray, are flowers of a 
common hope that our country's springtime may abound more and 
more to a far summer. Side by side, the North and South face 
the future and look into it with the same desire, and shall march 
against its dangers, and I trust through them with linked pace. 

Best sign of all, as it were horses and chariots of fire round about, 
are the schools of every rural precinct and village and city where 
the children of rich and poor, cultured and ignorant meet together 
and by associations as well as by study learn to rule themselves as 
ecpial and free and one. Self-preserved by thus training her gen 
erations ever to purer and wiser patriotism, may the republic live 
to celebrate her Century of Centuries. 



NATION BUILDING. 

AN ORATION BY REV. HUGH MILLER THOMPSON, D. D 

delivered at the centennial celebration, at new orleans, 
la., july 4th, 187(3. 

The day is coming when our people will realize the responsibil- 
ity of the work which the God of Nations has given men to do. 

I do not believe that nations are a joint stock corporation, for 
the production of so much wealth and enjoyment. A nation is 
worth just the men, and just the women it produces. 

If we desire to estimate the value of America to-day, we should 
ask, not what its experiments or advances are, but what its man- 
hood is. How much of downright honor, integrity, firmness of 
purpose, courage, and manly back-bone, and virtue, there may 
remain in the people ? 

It is one of the works of a nation to train men — to bring them 
up. This is what nations are doing all the world over. 

The nation which educates its men according to the best type of 
manhood should rank as the foremost of the earth. 

The speaker illustrated this principle by a reference to the 
present training of the youth of England and France ; and the 
development of the children of America into the types of true man- 
hood. 

In this training there are two powers which go to advance and 
consummate it. 

1. There is the Law of the laud, and the law of the land is tlm 
declaration of the principles of the people. Many persons fancy 
that legislation makes the law, but the living law of the land no 
legislature can make or repeal ; it is the judgment of the people 
as to what is right or wrong ; and by it their opinions of what is 
just and honorable are regulated. 

2. There are the National Traditions of a people : their national 
sense and feeling. 



ORATION — REV. HUGH MILLER THOMPSON, D. D. 635 

Sometimes it is called public opinion. Real public opinion is 
the deliberate conviction handed down from father to son. 

Truth of speech is part of the tradition of our land. No man 
has ever lived and died nobly whose life has not been incorporated 
in the national traditions. Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, and 
all the great men of our heroic period contributed to the stream of 
national traditions, and it is by such traditions that the character 
of our young men is to be moulded. 

The lives of bad men are never taken as models by a nation. 
" The good that men do lives after them ; the evil is buried with 
their bones." The deeds of Washington live, Arnold's die. 

The best nation is not the richest or the strongest, but the one 
with the best government. 

One hundred years ago our forefathers took upon themselves the 
responsibility of making a nation — they took it out of the hands 
of kings, leaders, statesmen, into their own hard, rough hands. 

The speaker observed that he noted too general a disposition to 
put an implicit trust in a particular leader, and to give all the credit 
of a victory to him. All of the great victories of this world have 
been won by the nameless combatants who have gone down to un- 
known graves. 

No good can come to this country from any single man. 

I have been sometimes afraid, when observing that the best 
classes of the community keep away from the polls and the 
primary meetings, as places too rough for gentlemen, that the ex- 
pectations of our forefathers were defeated when they established 
a democratic government. A democracy was never kid-gloved. 

If the men of culture and refinement, who wear kid gloves and 
fine clothes, are going to live in a Republic, they must be content 
to crowd the polls, side by side with the men from the factory 
and the engine, in their coarse blouses. 

The masses are to blame for the corruption in the Government, 
for it devolves upon every honest man to consider well in the mat- 
ter and place men of integrity in office. 

The speaker pointed to the approach of a glorious day for the 
Republic. 

The good of a nation is advanced by the influence of unseen 



636 OUK NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

deeds and words ; more by the ploughshare than the sword ; more 
by the benevolent act of some good woman in her home, among 
her children, than the eloquence of a Senate ; more by the kind- 
ness of man to man than the splendid victories which cause the 
bells to peal. 

It has been often the case that nations have grown up unnoticed 
and unknown ; its roots have been hidden in secrecy' and darkness; 
gradually the little leaves of natural life have broken through the 
obscuring earth. Still years have elapsed before the tree has 
stood, like a firm rooted oak, upon the hills or plains. 

( )ne hundred years ago to-day this people sprang full-armed and 
full-grown into national life. With all the stores that had been 
collected by Asia and Europe, and the civilization of Africa, it 
began its career of progress, giving to the earth a new people, but 
not a new race. This people had a new land in which to try the 
experiments of civilization. It seems as if the Divine Ruler of the 
world had preserved for ages this virgin land that men might come 
to it in the full growth of experience and advancement, and under- 
take to amend in the future the sad failures of the past. Some 
'nations have been created for one purpose, others for another, 
according to the providence of God, but it seems to have been 
especially reserved for this people to undertake, in the world's 
prime, the work of Nation Building in a manner in which it had 
never been essayed before. Other nations had to work their way 
along, slowly and with difficulty ; they had to learn by bitter ex- 
perience, after many failures and blunders, and finally only suc- 
ceeded in part. We began our national career with the failures of 
other peoples as Avarnings, and at once America became the beacon- 
light of unhappy and oppressed races throughout the world. From 
all quarters of the globe men turned their eyes in expectation to- 
wards a laud where human life should assume a new meaning, 
where human existence should take a new purpose, where all the 
failures which had darkened the future of mankind, elsewhere, 
were to be swept away. 

America became the hope and trust of all mankind. No 
European race can claim the sole honor of the organization of this 
people. The Celt, the Saxon and the Teuton, alike have had their 
part to play, in forming a newer and better country. We are to- 



ORATION — REV. nUGII MILLER THOMPSON, D. D. 637 

day as our fathers were in the past, engaged in this work of 
nation building. Many nations have had (heir representative to 
build for them ; they have had kings to guide them, despots to 
lead the way for them. We have had none of these. Our heroic 
age was very short. The peculiarity of American civilization is 
that we depend upon no hero, no king, least of all, a despot, for 
our civilization, but on the average Common Sense of common 
men. Upon the average men and women of this land has come 
the work of nation building. It has been our part to fell forests, 
to drain marshes, to build cities, to lay railroads that carry 
commerce and civilization over the broad prairies of the West, 
and the savannas of the South, and the hills and dales of the 
North. We have prospered in these hundred years that have 
passed, and, thank God, there is nothing in our history which we 
desire to hide for shame. We have had hard work, have made 
mistakes, and have been not the best people in the world, by any 
means. 

Look upon the record of our conquests over the physical forces. 
Let the world look, and see what we have done in one hundred 
years. What other land in all the earth can show the like ? 

We can show no throne, and thank God for that. We can show 
no aristocracy, and thank God for that, also. 

We have no established church. You cannot point out in the 
streets the towering columns which commemorate victories in the 
past, neither the statues of the heroes fallen centuries ago. We 
cannot point you to the lofty palaces of our great and rich men, 
but we can direct your gaze to Forty Millions of people, better fed v 
better housed, better cared for, better clothed, more intelligent, 
better educated in the average than any forty millions of people 
that have ever lived upon earth. I take it that this is something 
to be thankful for. 

While we are showing our visitors, in this Centennial year, the 
great advancements in material civilization, I am sure that our 
people have not forgotten what lies before them in the century 
which is to come. 



NATIONAL PEKILS AND SAFEGUARDS. 

AN ORATION 1? Y HON. THEODORE ROMEYN. 

DELIVERED AT DETROIT, MICH., JULY 4tH, 1876. 

The English colonization of North America commenced less 
than three centuries ago. 

Patents, or charters were procured from the Crown, and the 
relations of the colonies were directly with the King and not with 
Parliament. Hence, in the Declaration of Independence, is the 
recital of the injuries and usurpations of the Crown. The right 
of Parliament to pass laws affecting their internal affairs, or for 
raising revenue by taxing them, was steadfastly denied,, and efforts 
to exercise such asserted rights were uniformly resisted. Such 
attempts led to united arrangements for opposition and redress. 

On the 6th of July, 1774, Massachusetts passed resolutions, 
inviting the other colonies to meet in general congress. Delegates 
from all of them, except Georgia, met in Philadelphia in Septem- 
ber, 1774. These joined in a declaration of rights, claiming that 
the foundation of English liberty and of all free governments is a 
right in the people to participate in their legislative council, and 
that, as they were not, and from various causes could not be 
represented in the British Parliament, they were entitled to a free 
and exclusive power of legislation, in their several provincial 
legislatures, in all cases of taxation and internal policy; subject 
only to the negative of their sovereign ; while they expressed their 
cheerful assent to such acts of the British Parliament as were re- 
strained to the regulation of their external commerce for the pur- 
pose of securing the commercial advantages of the whole empire to 
the mother country. 

Their claims were rejected, and Parliament persisted in passing 
laws for levying taxes. 

Armed resistance began at Boston. That city was seized and 



ORATION HON. THEODORE 110MEYN. 039 

occupied by British troops. Its port was closed ; civil courts were 
suspended. 

On the 19th of April, 1775, a large detachment of the British 
army marched from Boston to capture the military stores which 
had been accumulated by Massachusetts at Concord. Passing 
through Lexington they fired upon a small body of militia, about 
seventy in number, and not drawn up in array, and killed eight. 
The detachment marched on to Concord. The people of the town 
gathered for defense and fell back across the North Bridge, with 
orders from their commander, Maj. John Butterick, not to give the 
first fire. While they were pulling up the planks of the bridge 
the British opened fire upon them. This was returned, and the 
first battle of the Revolution there began. 

" By the rude bridge that spans the flood, 

Their flag in April's breeze unfurled ; 
That day the embattled farmers stood 

And fired the shot heard round the world." 

The sword was drawn, but the scabbard was not yet thrown 
aside. Petitions and remonstrances were still addressed to Parlia- 
ment, asking for concessions and aiming at reconciliation. 

On the 15th of June, 1775, George Washington was unanimous- 
ly elected by Congress, Commander-in-Chief of the Provincial 
army. The next day, and before his arrival at Boston, the battle 
of Bunker Hill was fought. 

Still there was hope of adjustment and peace. On the 8th of 
July, 1775, Congress sent a respectful and loyal petition to the 
King. They also issued an address to the inhabitants of Great 
Britain. 

All efforts to secure their rights failing, independence began to 
be spoken of as the sole resource. Georgia on the 20th of July, 
1775, acceded to the confederation. The delegates of the colonies, 
now numbering thirteen, continued in session, and still aimed 
at peaceful adjustment. But the conflict grew broader and deeper. 

On the 4th day of July, 1770, the delegates from the thirteen 
colonies, after long debate, adopted the declaration which has just 
been read to you ; and, appealing to the Supreme Judge of 
the world for the rectitude of their intentions, they did solemnly 



640 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

publish and declare that the United Colonies were and of 
right ought to be free and independent States. 

This was the necessary result \,l their treatment by Parliament. 
This declaration embraces the assertion of the principles of 
government and of the rights of the colonists as always claimed by 
them. The alternatives were abject submission or asserted 
independence. They chose the latter, and the result is Our 
Country. 

One hundred years ago the sun shone on less than three 
millions of people in these colonies, living along the narrow belt 
east of the Alleghanies, with no claim to the territory west of the 
Mississippi, or to its mouth, or to the shores of the Gulf, or 
to the Floridas. West of the mountain range and north of 
the Ohio was an untouched wilderness, except so far as occupied 
by Indians and by a few French settlements. Some of these had 
been made along the waters that bound our own State. In all 
the Northwestern territory, now comprising the States of Ohio, 
Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Winconsin, and containing more 
than ten millions of inhabitants, there was not a settlement of 
English origin, and the white population did not exceed five 
thousand. 

A century has passed, and we meet to celebrate the beginning 
of another. 

The revolving earth brought this morning to the first rays of 
the sun the rocks and sands of the Atlantic coast. As it rolls on, 
the whole breadth of the continent, from the lakes to the gulf 
and to the boundaries of Mexico, will reflect the day-beams, 
until they glitter on the golden gate of California and are 
quenched in the Pacific. Everywhere within these boundaries, 
on this day, the " bloom of banners " is in the air, but no foreign 
flag waves as a sign of sovereignty. The star spangled banner 
floats over the wide domain, the emblem of a nationality, which 
comprises more than forty millions of, thanks to God, united and 
free people. 

In the City of Philadelphia, then having a population of less than 
forty thousand, more than seven hundred thousand people now 
dwell, and to-day the nation holds there its great festival, where 
its chief officers and representatives from all its States and 



ORATION HON. THEODORE ROMEYN. OH 

Territories meet, in fraternal congress, with the representatives 
of foreign powers from every continent, to keep its centennial 
birthday, amidst the splendors of an unparalleled exhibition of the 
products of science, art, industry, skill and wealth gathered from 
almost every nation under the sun. 

Our own city, one hundred years ago, occupied a space of about 
three acres on the river, enclosed by pickets and defended by 
block-houses and guns, and traversed by streets or alleys from 
ten to sixteen feet wide. Its population was less than four 
hundred. It was, during the war of the revolution, the seat of the 
British power in the Northwest ; and it remained in the possession 
of Great Britain until it was surrendered to the United States in 
1796. 

Sir Christopher "Wren was the architect of St. Paul's Cathedral 
in London. He was buried within its walls and on one of them is 
the inscription to his memory : 

" Si quasris monumentum, circumspice." 

We have borrowed this for our State's motto, and applied it 
to our pleasant Peninsula.* 

In contrasting our city with the Detroit of 1776, I will use 
no words of description, but say to each " circumspice," look 
around ! 

The prescribed and proper limits of this discourse will not allow 
a presentation of the development of our country in wealth, 
population, and industrial pursuits and results. These are in 
varying degrees common to us and to other civilized people. 
Never before has there been a century so full of arts and dis- 
coveries securing the progress and development of humanity. 

Time is annihilated in the transmission of intelligence. We 
travel in an hour farther than our ancestors could go in a 
day. New laws of nature have been discovered and its powers 
subjugated for man's use. We have learned to weigh the planets, 
to analyze the burning gases of the sun and of other stars. The 
steam engine, the railroad, the telegraph, the labor-saving machin- 

* The motto of Michigan is : " Si qureris peninsularis amoriam circum- 
spice." 

41 



642 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

ery of power-looms in factories, of the sewing-machine in the 
house, of the mower and the reaper in the fields, have changed the 
habits of mankind and multiplied production and wealth. 

The progress of other civilized nations and of our own with 
them in the last century cannot be now sketched ; but there are 
some matters peculiar to ourselves which it is well to consider on 
this day. 

Eleven years after the Declaration of Independence and four 
years from the close of the war, the Constitution was framed and 
adopted by the people of the United States, who declared that ; 
" WE THE PEOPLE OF THE UNITED STATES, in order 
to form a more perfect union, establish justice, secure domestic 
tranquillity, provide for the common defense, promote the general 
welfare, and secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our 
posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution of the United 
States of America." 

One of the most notable provisions is found in the first words of 
the first article of the amendments, to wit : " Congress shall make 
no law respecting an establishment of religion or prohibit the free 
exercise thereof." 

This was the first time in history that the foundation of religious 
freedom was secured in the fundamental laws or institutions of a 
State, if we except the provision for it in the. little colony of Rhode 
Island. The persecuted Puritans became forthwith proscribers of 
those who did not believe in their tenets and who adhered to other 
forms of worship. Every other colony, except the Catholic com- 
munity of Maryland, made distinctions between different sects of 
nominal Christians ; and even in Maryland a profession of faith in 
Christianity in some form was required. In our country this dis- 
position to secure sectarian legislation and by governmental in- 
fluences to discriminate between one form of faith and another has 
not been eradicated. 

Some of the earlier State Constitutions did not forbid such 
legislation, and, in fact, gave preference to some forms of be- 
lief; and even now the friends of an entire and consistent and 
pure separation of Church and State, have to combat this pro- 
pensity in legislation, in municipal ordinances, and in official ad- 
ministration. 



ORATION HON. THEODORE ROMEYN. 643 

The Constitution undoubtedly recognized the legal existence of 
slavery as an established fact. 

The relations of the citizens to their several States and to the 
Federal Government, were not so distinctly traced as to prevent 
the introduction into politics of a false and pernicious theory of 
State rights, and of a paramount allegiance to the State over 
that due to the nation. 

The influence of slavery on the character of the communities 
where it prevailed, and on their views of the worth and dignity of 
labor, was fast making us two peoples. Mr. Lincoln was right 
when he so said, and that there must be all slave States or all free 
in our system. 

Interwoven with the socjal fabric, and with all business relations, 
the wisest could see no way of disentangling 1 slavery and setting rid 
of it. Its friends, clamorous generally for State rights, nevertheless 
insisted that the inhabitants of a Territory should not decide for 
themselves, whether it should be subject to slavery ; and they even 
denied the right of a free State to forbid the introduction and 
employment of slaves within its own limits. How should this state 
of things be met and redressed ? What way of escape could 
be found from the perplexities and collisions and bitterness yearly 
increasing ? It came in a way we knew not of. The slave owners, 
in their contempt for the laboring men of the North — where all 
labor — brought on the conflict. It deepened, continued and was 
intensified, until it ended in laying the ax at the root and in the 
extirpation of the bitter and poisonous growth. 

The wrath of a man made to praise God. The sword severed 
the shackle. It fell from the slave and he stood — and stands — re- 
deemed, regenerated and dissenthralled ; and the amended Constitu- 
tion of what is now his country, secures to him the inalienable 
rights with which the Creator endowed him — life, liberty, and the 
pursuit of happiness. 

The supremacy of the Union over all its citizens is now unques- 
tioned. The doctrine of a right to secede from the Union, or so 
nullify its laws, while remaining nominally within its protection, is 
dead and buried and sealed up beyond revival or resurrection. 

There is the old flag, with its stripes unrent, with its clustered 
stars in their places, and not running lawless through the sky. 



644 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

"Again our banner floats abroad, 

Gone the one stain that on it fell ; 
And, bettered by His chastening rod, 
With streaming eyes uplift to God 

We say 'He doeth all tilings well.' " 

This civil conflict bore other fruits. It proved the military 
strength and resources of our country and the patriotism and 
courage of our citizens. 

"We, in the North, were unwilling to believe that there was 
danger of civil war ; yet when it had been actually commenced, 
how grand was the spectacle of the nation springing to arms 
to protect its integrity of territory and institutions. 

Interlaced by railroads and rivers, there was no practicable 
place for a line of division — which would free the separated repub- 
lics from interference and collision. A confederacy resting on 
slavery, certainly — would be insolent, aggressive, belligerent. 

Our people in the North instinctively perceived that our institu- 
tions could not live if disunion triumphed. Here, in our State, 
the farmer left his plow, the woodman dropped his ax. Others 
went from their shops or their desks. More than 90,000 were 
enrolled or enlisted. More than 14,000 perished from wounds or 
disease. Again and again were thinned and wasted regiments 
filled up by new volunteers ; and when the good fight had 
been fought and the conflict won, the survivors returned to their 
homes and former avocations, and "hung up their bruised arms 
for monuments." 

In his history of England, Macaulay tells us that, when 50,000 
troops were to be discharged after the restoration of monarchy, it 
was believed that : " This change would produce much misery 
and crime, that the discharged veterans would be seen begging 
in every street, or would be driven by hunger to pillage." And 
it seemed strange at that time that no such result followed, 
and that " In a few months there remained not a trace indicating 
that the most formidable army in the world had just been absorbed 
in the mass of the community." 

The close of our civil struggle found in the armies of the North 
and South more than 1,000,000 soldiers, and all of them spontane- 
ously and cheerfully " beat their swords into plowshares and 



ORATION HON. THEODORE ROMEYN. 645 

their spears into pruning hooks," and returned into civil life and 
industrial pursuits. 

"We recall the vivid picture drawn by the fancy of the poet, in 
the " Lady of the Lake," where Roderick Dhu's warriors sprang 
up before Fitz-James, and again disappeared at their chieftain's 
signal. When 

" From crag to crag the signal flew — 
Instant through copse and heath arose 
Bonnets and spears and bended bows. 
******* 

Tli£ rushes and the willow wand 
Are bristling into axe and brand, 
And every tuft of broom gives life 
To plaided warrior aimed for strife. 

******* 

Short space he stood, then waved his hand, 
Down sunk the disappearing band ; 
It seemed as if their mother earth 
Had swallowed up her warlike birth. 
The wind's last breath had tossed in air 
Pennon and plaid and plumage fair; 
The next but swept a lone hillside 
Where heath and fern were waving wide." 

After the close of the war and restoration of the national su- 
premacy, our government granted universal amnesty, and, substan- 
tially, universal restoration to civil rights. This is a new thing in 
history. Wars have been and for a long time will be among men. 
While among all civilized nations they have become more humane, 
our government has given the first example •of clemency and pardon 
to all, after the successful close of civil war. 

Rejoicing in the result, nevertheless, I for one do not wish to 
clasp hands with the plotters and authors of the terrible strife. It 
was deliberately planned and set in motion for personal ends by 
parties who saw their political supremacy in danger of departing, 
and who had the devil's feeling : 

" Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven." 

So soon as through their own scheming a President had been 
elected, without the votes of their section, they proceeded to carry 



G4G OUU NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

into effect their traitorous plotting, begun many years before. 
They enticed into the Confederacy State after State. The Southern 
people had been trained to believe that they owed no allegiance to 
the nation as against their respective States. Many of the educa- 
ted men of the South so thought. Though opposed to secession, 
obey went with their States, and in so doing they were honest and 
loyal to what they believed their true allegiance. 

"We do not exult over the defeat of these brave men, except for 
the reason that it was necessary to conquer them in order to crush 
their cause. It is sorrowful to think how many fell in endeavoring 
to maintain it. Next to a defeat, said Wellington, the saddest 
thing is a victory. Again at peace and with all acknowledging the 
supremacy of the nation, we rejoice over these, our brethren, who 
were lost, and are found. We heartily recognize and greet them 
as such. Their country is our country ; and on this occasion, it is 
meet that they and we should join in proclaiming, that we have 
" one constitution, one country and one destiny." 

But to those who schemed to inaugurate revolution, to kill the 
nation, to overturn its institutions, so that they might sit high on 
the ruins, although they would have to wade through blood to reach 
their bad eminence ; who cared nothing for the prosperity and 
peace and supremacy of " their own, their native land," I would 
not accord the charity of forgetfnlness, the shelter of oblivion. 
And while I thus express my sentiments I believe I share them 
with most of the loyal men of the land of all parties and locali- 
ties. 

On this memorial day it is meet that we recall the names and 
characters and services of the author of the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence and of its eloquent and strenuous supporters in Congress, 
Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. 

Successively, after Washington. Presidents of the United States, 
they lived to see the fiftieth anniversary of its adoption, and then* 
full of years and honors, when the half of a century had rolled 
around and their fellow-citizens were in the midst of their public 
gatherings on that day of jubilee, by the most marvellous coinci- 
dence in history, they both left the scene of their struggle and 
triumphs. Can imagination conceive a more fitting and glorious 
close to such lives ? And does not the recollection of this event 



ORATION HON. THEODORE ROMEYN. 617 

give a deeper tone to the feeling with which we hail and keep this 
6econd jubilee ? 

The late civil war furnishes recollections of notable acts, the oc- 
currence of which, on the anniversary of this day, are little less 
remarkable. 

On the 4th of July, 1863, after three days of fierce fighting, the 
shattered and wasted army of the South, under Gen. Lee, retired 
from the bloody field of Gettysburg, thus ending the last and most 
desperate struggle to invade the Northern States. On the same 
day Vicksburg surrendered, and the rebellious element was hem- 
med in between the Atlantic and the Mississipi. These great vic- 
tories alone should hallow this anniversary. They were the begin- 
ning of the end of the war. Its result was no longer doubtful. 

However we may differ in our estimate of them, as politicians, 
or as civil administrators, yet we, in this city, where they respec- 
tively had their homes for years, on this occasion, will, I am sure, 
unite in grateful and honoring recollections of the illustrious and 
successful commanders to whom, under God, we owe these crowning 
victories — Gen. Meade and Gen. Grant. 

We have no time to further recall the past. What is before us? 
What will the next Centennial exhibit ? All of us will have gone 
to join the great congregation of the dead. Some of us are so 
near the allotted limits of life, that we almost hear the tread of the 
coming generations, who will soon walk over our graves. What 
will meet the vision of those who shall keep the second Centen- 
nial ? If (as I firmly believe will be) our institutions and union 
continue, eye has not seen nor has it entered into the heart of man 
to conceive what will then exist. 

Under the influence of the teachings of Christianity and of ex- 
tended civilization, of diffused knowledge by the press and of in- 
creased intercourse among the residents of different countries, the 
assured tendency is toward republicanism in each government and 
to peaceful relations among all of them. 

Marked changes have taken place in the mode of living, in com- 
mercial transactions and in the distribution of population. Asso- 
ciated wealth is the dynasty of modern States. The vast accumula- 
tions of it in few hands, in connection with the railroad, the 
Steamer and the telegraph concentrates business and population in 



648 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

the larger ctyies. Industrial pursuits, once common in our villages, 
have disappeared. The individual artisan and the small shop- 
keeper work to great disadvantage, when they work at all. Capi- 
talists readily enter into combination with other capitalists, and 
wages have not advanced in proportion with the profits of capital. 

Trades' unions have naturally sprung into existence, and it is 
idle to deny that there is an increasing conflict between capital and 
labor. I believe that the solution will be found in the principle of 
association and co-operation, and that workmen will unite and carry 
on their labor in concert for their joint benefit, or will enter into 
combination with capitalists on specified and equitable terms, for 
the division of profits. 

"We cannot fail to see our prominent dangers. Among these is 
peril of inefficient government of the masses gathered in our great 
cities, and having the position and power of voters. To meet this 
we must rely on the general disposition of the American people, 
as individuals, or in communities and municipal organizations, to 
submit to the law, to acquiesce in the decrees of its ministers, and 
to compel their enforcement. 

Another safeguard is the extending intelligence of the people. 

Republican government cannot continue over people who are 
corrupt, or who do not love and prize liberty, or who are ignorant 
or uneducated. The masses of our citizens are honest, patriotic 
and conservative, and the means of education are generally supplied 
and used. Much remains to be done in the Southern States, but 
there is a moral certainty of its ultimate accomplishment. Our 
political and social institutions rest upon the common school as 
their chief corner-stone. It is meant for all. Its object is to 
furnish the means of education for all, of whatever race or creed. 

Supported in various degrees by taxes paid by people of differ- 
ent religious beliefs, it should be confined in its teachings to what 
is objectionable to none. Kept free from sectarianism, furnishing 
intellectual culture, inviting and receiving and educating the 
children of all classes and creeds, without distinction or favor, it 
will be the strongest support and bulwark of our institutions. 

Next to the common school, the most potent agency in educating 
the people and the most influential in its effects on their opinions 
and actions, in political matters, is found in the great and increas- 



ORATION HON. THE ODOIiE ROMEYN. 649 

ing use of newspapers and periodicals. The influence of individual 
statesmen and politicians is much lessened. The debates in Con- 
gress and harangues from the hustings no longer form or direct 
public opinion. People read the newspapers, to a great extent 
judge for themselves, or adopt the views of their favorite editors. 
"Wherever an avenue is opened the newspapers goes like sunlight 
into every place from which it is not positively excluded. 

The results of each day in every part of our own land and in 
foreign lands, are reflected by the telegraph into a concentrated mass 
of information, which gives every reader an opportunity of knowing 
whatever is deemed worthy of note in the world's daily doings. 

The information derived from the newspaper tends to lead the 
citizen to decide and act for himself in political matters. It fur- 
nishes the means and materials for forming his own judgment. Its 
power is vast and increasing. While it has unworthy members, 
who, for notoriety or money, invade private life or give distorted 
or false statements' of passing events, yet it has of late years 
increased in ability and enterprise and independence ; and fore- 
most among the agencies which we trust will combine in maintain- 
ing republican institutions in vigor and purity we place the honest, 
truthful newspaper. 

Our fathers founded and reared these in struggles and conflict, 
building, as did the Jews in the days of Nehemiah, when they 
renewed the walls of Jerusalem. " For the builders every one had 
his sword girded by his side and so builded." To preserve these 
we have passed through the late stupenduous civil war. The 
monument before us was " erected by the people of Michigan in 
honor of the martyrs who fell and the heroes who fought in defense 
of liberty and union." 

Around us are many who joined in the conflict and who live to 
receive this day the heartfelt thanks, the grateful greetings of their 
fellow-citizens here assembled. Whatever may be the future of 
our country, our duty is plain. With gratitude to the Supreme 
Disposer of events for the goodness and mercy which have marked 
the past and looking to Him for the future guidance, let us act in 
the living present and strive to maintain and to transmit to those 
who will live after us a government of the people, by the people, 
and for the people. 



THE GKEAT GIFT OF GOD. 

AN ADDRESS BY KEY. WM. AIRMAN, D.D. 

DELIVERED AT DETROIT (WHITNEY'S OPERA HOUSE), JULY 4, 1876. 

Friends and fellow-citizens : — With me you recognize the 
exceeding fitness of our gathering on the early morning of this 
Fourth of July. Our hearts would be wronged were we not pub- 
licly and together as citizens looking up to God as this great day 
opens benignly upon us. It is a day which He the Infinite God 
has made for us. 

We may safely say that no nation but one has had a history so 
marked by the superintending Providence of God. He hid this 
Western continent until the ages were ripe for its discovery. He 
kept our portion of it safe and held it till His people, chosen out of 
three nations, were ready to take it. 

He made them ready by His strange processes of oppression, 
persecution and impending death. They went under his guidance, 
these mighty men and angelic women, the greatest and the best of 
earth, from England, from Holland, from France. When in all 
the ages came such men and such women into a new land ? God 
brought them here. They were as truly called and they went as 
truly at God's command as once the Patriarch was called out of 
Ur of the Chaldees. They went like him not knowing whither 
they went, but they went in faith and they found a land of whose 
glories Canaan was but an epitome and a type. God gave it to 
them. 

What was not so clear at the beginning has been cleared as the 
years have gone on. Who can read the story of the Revolution 
and not see God's hand on every page ? Lord Chatham said : 
" For myself I must avow that in all my readings — and I have 
read Thucydides and the master-states of the world — for solidity 
of reasoning, force of sagacity and wisdom under a complication of 



ADDRESS KEY. W. AIRMAN, D.D. 65] 

difficult circumstances, no nation or body of men can stand in pre- 
ference to the General Congress of Philadelphia. The history of 
Greece and Rome give us nothing equal to it." Never, we may 
add, in this world before or since were so' many men of transcend- 
ant ability arrayed at one time around a common cause. They 
were God's masterworks, made for the hour. 

God was at the birth of the nation. Think how, in spite of 
human contrivance and against human desire and ancestral preju- 
dice, the bonds which hold so strongly the colonies to the parent 
states, were broken by that declaration which we celebrate to-day ! 
By what combinations above and beyond human forecast it was 
brought about ! God was in it. 

He gave this people Washington. Among the marvellous cre- 
ations of God where will we find a more wonderful than he ? His 
character grows more sublime in each succeeding year, and his 
name as that of no other man has gone out over the earth and 
holds the increasing admiration of the people of every land and 
tongue. 

Who can fail to see God's hand in the marvellous occurrence of 
the War of the Revolution, when out of more defeats than vic- 
tories a triumph was won and the power of the foremost nation 
of the world was thrown off ? 

There were hours when no human eye could see a ray of hope, 
but God kept hope alive in those undaunted hearts, and again and 
again, above the agency of men, foiled the malice of traitors, broke 
the power of foes, inspired the courage of friends, and at the hour 
of rayless dai-kness gave light and deliverance. 

Shall we fail to recognize the hand of God in the formation of 
our government ? Our constitution lias stood the test of nearly 
ninety years, and each one of them has spread its power wider and 
more beneficently abroad. It has stood strain and shock such as 
never tried government before. God made it strong. 

Who will not see the almighty hand in the preservation of this 
nation ? That we are not to-day weeping while we walk among 
the awful ruins of our country, that we are not hanging our heads 
in shame and mourning, that we have not blushes and groans on 
this anniversary instead of smiles and exultant songs, that we cel- 
ebrate the day at all, is of God ! It was an inspiration of the 



652 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Almighty that awakened the people, that gave them the courage 
to hear the toil, endure the sorrow, accept the bereavement of 
those days when brother struck at brother's life and countrymen 
sought to destroy the state. 

It was God that gave us Lincoln. God made him the calm, 
patient, enduring, loving man that he was. God gave him his 
undying courage, his unfaltering faith, his far-reaching wisdom. 

God crave us those men who fought and suffered, those who live 
and rejoice with us to-day, or who sleep in their glory and our 
love as we enshrine them in our hearts. They were God's gift. 

"Who that looks at this flag and knows that it waves over a land 
without a slave will not see in its starry folds the Goodness of 
God ? "We wished and we labored and we prayed that some time 
it might tell only of freedom, but we dared not hope to see the 
day. Now for these thirteen years we have been exulting ; with 
dimmed eyes we watch its wavy rise and fall — it floats on this 
summer air — the flag of the free. God made it pure. 

Thus we look over the solemn days of war, over the sweet days 
of peace, over the long-drawn years of prosperity, of religious 
liberty so like this ambient air that we forget that we breathe it, 
and with hearts too full for utterance we bow and worship and 
praise Him, our God and our fathers' God. 



ADDEESS 

HON. A. LEWIS, MAYOR OF DETROIT, PRESIDENT OF 

THE DAY. 

delivered at the centennial celebration at detroit, mlch. 
July 4th, 1876. 

Fellow-citizens. — It seems fit and proper on an occasion like 
this that we should meet together to honor the memories of the 
Patriot Fathers, who brought our nation into existence, and to com- 
memorate the great event of 1776. The assemblage of so vast a 
multitude here to-day speaks well for the descendants of those 
honored heroes who perilled their all that we might be free. From 
a small colony, in a century we have grown to be one of the mighty 
nations of the earth ; and in Philadelphia to-day, within a stone's 
throw of where the Declaration of Independence was signed, is in 
progress the "World's Fair that tells more forcibly than words can 
express of the growth and development of our country, as it sur- 
passes in splendor and magnificence anything the world ever saw. 
No wonder, then that we feel proud of our inheritance and rejoice 
for the many blessings kind Providence has so liberally showered 
upon us. Long may we continue to increase and prosper, and 
deserve the many blessings that we enjoy. 



THE DISTINCTIVE FEATURES OF OUR REPUBLIC. 

AN ORATION BY HON. SHELBY M. CULLOM. 

DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION AT GENESEE, JULY 4, 

1876. 

Fellow-citizens. — Ours is a government, in the language of 
the immortal Lincoln, of the people, hy the people, and for the 
people — a government in which the people are the rulers and the 
office-holders the agents. Office-holders seem to almost forget this 
sometimes, and imagine themselves the rulers and the people the 
servants ; hut when that idea grows upon a man until he shows its 
effect upon his conduct, he suddenly finds himself one of the people, 
with his little hrief authority gone, generally forever. * 

How can we judge, my friends, whether a nation is well founded 
or not ? 

" By their fruits ye shall know them." By the growth, wealth, 
learning, morality, and general condition of a people we may judge 
of the foundation principles of the government, and whether it has 
been well managed. 

Our country has been almost if not quite without a parallel in 
growth and development in all that it takes to make a nation great. 

Napoleon once said that " statistics mean the keeping the exact 
account of a nation's affairs, and without such an account there is 
no safety. 

Goethe said " he did not know whether figures governed the 
world or not, but he did know that it showed how it was governed." 

Following these suggestions, let us recur to our past history for 
a little while, giving some figures as to our growth and progress in 
several directions. One hundred years ago the United States con- 
tained only about 815,000 square miles of territory. To-day it 
includes over 3,500,000. One hundred years ago the population 
of America was less than 3,000,000 — about as many people as we 



ORATION HON. SHELBY M. CULLOM. 655 

have in Illinois to-day. Now we have over 40,000,000 of free 
people in the land. Then the population and improvements of the 
country skirted along the shores of the Atlantic, mainly east of the 
Alleghanies ; now the busy hum of machinery driven at the will of 
an industrious, enterprising, progressive people, is lost upon the 
waves of the western ocean. Boundless prairies have been cul- 
tivated by the hand of industry ; and vast wildernesses, the silence 
of which have never been broken by the voice of a human being 
save by the rude language and wild yell of the red man, have fal- 
len before the woodman's ax, and from which the harvest is now 
being gathered. Cities are built all over the land ; school-houses 
spreading their light and knowledge to the rich and poor alike, and 
churches of all creeds, pointing their way to virtue and purity, and 
teaching to all a religion which offers to man victory over death 
and immortality beyond, and lifts the clouds and darkness that rests 
upon and envelops eternity. 

At the close of the Revolution we were without a navy, and had 
but a small army imperfectly equipped. At the close of the late 
war we had a navy that was mistress of the seas, and an army that 
marshaled a million brave, patriotic heroes, and arms and artillery 
that never had been equalled. At the close of the war for indepen- 
dence our commerce was of little importance. Now our commercial 
vessels are seen on every river,' and plowing every ocean, and trad- 
ing in every mart. While the engine, with long trains of passen- 
gers and freight goes thundering along its track across plains and 
over hill and mountain with almost the speed of lightning, from the 
Atlantic to the Pacific, and from the lakes to the gulf, bearing the 
products of a fertile soil and grateful toil to our great centers of 
home trade, then to be transferred to the markets of the world, our 
flag is respected as far as commerce spreads her sails upon the seas 
or civilization walks the earth. The telegraph conveys intelligence 
to all parts of this land, and by the use of the ocean cable com- 
munication is opened with all parts of the globe wherever enter- 
prise and civilization have found a footing thereon. What next? 
The American people are perhaps giving more attention to the 
education of the masses than any other people. This is the natural 
result of our system of government — a necessity of its existence. 
According to the census of 1870 there were in this country, in the 



656 



OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 



States alone, over 6,500,000 pupils under instruction, at a cost of 
$94,000,000 a year — common schools and seminaries and colleges 
everywhere, and every child tendered an opportunity of a substan- 
tial education. 

Free schools, free gospel and free ballot form a distinctive and 
important feature in this country. Other nations take account of 
themselves with reference to war. We with reference to peace 
and the individual happiness and prosperity of all the peojile. 

The grand idea of the leading minds in the cause of education 
to-day is to leave no rational child in the State without a common- 
school education. There is no monopoly of education in this coun- 
try, and there ought not to be of anything else so far as relates to 
matters under government control. We have been called a babe of 
100 years. We are getting along pretty well for an infant, and can 
take care of ourselves pretty well. We have about 35,000 postoffices 
in the country, and, of course, that many postmasters, for I never 
knew a postoffice to remain vacant very long, especially if a repre- 
sentative in Congress had the appointment by courtesy. In such 
case there was generally more than one applicant, and the candidate 
for Congress had trouble. 

There are 2,800 miles of postal service in this country, over 75,- 
000,000 of postal orders issued in 1875 — a sort of cheap bank 
arrangement to accommodate the people. 

Take the question of railroads, in 1800 there was not a single 
railroad in the country anywhere. Now, there are over 70,000 
miles of road in actual use. These lines of railroad are scattered 
all over this great country — 6,000 miles in the New England States 
13,000 miles in the Middle States, 36,000 miles in the Western 
States, 13,500 in the Southern States, and 2,000 miles in the 
Pacific States. Illinois alone has 7,109 miles of main line and 
branches of railroad, which is more than any other State in the 
Union, Pennsylvania coming next, having 5,750 miles, and New 
Yord third, having 5,500 miles. There is a mile of railroad in this 
State for 429 inhabitants, and every 8 2-10 square miles of territory. 
We have railroads all about us, carrying the people and the pro- 
ducts of the soil, and skilled labor in every direction, satisfying the 
wants and equalizing the conditions of the people, bringing them 
all substantially on one grand level in opportunity to enjoy life and 
accumulate property. 



ORATION — HON. SHELBY M. CULLOJI. G")7 

The people have heen extravagant and reckless beyond their real 
interest in the construction of railroads. National, county, city, 
and town subsidies have been voted for their construction. Almost 
beyond measure, and under the unnatural and extravagant impetus 
given such enterprises by the people, railroads have been built 
where they were not needed. Railroad corporations grew extra- 
vagant and arrogant, and it became apparent that the rights of the 
people and the present and future of the country demanded that 
corporations should be made to realize that this is a country of law, 
and that any man or set of men organized for whatever purpose 
must deal honestly, and yield obedience to law, or suffer the penalty. 

Let it be understood once for all that there is nothing higher 
than the sovereign power of the State — the General in its sphere, 
and the State Government within its jurisdiction, and that all people 
and corporations must submit to whichever has rightful authority 
over us. The law books say there is no wrong without a remedy 
and if the people suffer wrong from the oppressions of railroads or 
other corporations, they must have a remedy. 

But I shall dwell too long on the growth and development of our 
country. To the Fathers again and their works. In the light of 
all observation and experience, and in the blazing brightness of 
this nineteenth century, we are compelled to say that the founders 
of our system of government, in laying down the lines which bound 
official authority and private rights — which divides the possessions 
of the one from the possessions of the other — approached nearer 
the infinite ways of an infinite God than any statesmen of former 
times. 

They walked where justice and liberty led the way — the love of 
which the Great Author of all has placed in the bosom of man to 
lead him out of darkness into light and truth and happiness. 

It is true that the authors of our system because of their weak- 
ness and the difficulties of the times, were unable to lift the slave 
on to the declaration of independence, but they unquestionably 
anticipated the time when the system would break the yoke of 
slavery. 

The time finally came ; and when the quickened conscience of 
the people was shown in the election of Lincoln to the office of 
President of the United States, the slaveholders were unwilling to 

42 



658 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

risk any longer the institution of slavery under our system, and 
they resolved to make a government of their own whose corner- 
stone should rest on the idea that slavery was a divine institution. 

To establish such a government they raised the standard of 
rebellion and treason and attempted a dissolution of the Union. 

The nation's downfall was predicted, but the guns at Sumter 
awoke the sons of freedom, relit the slumbering fires of patriotism 
in their bosoms, and they came from the various fields of toil and 
industry at the call of country, following the flag, keeping step to 
the music of the Union, and shouting the battle cry of freedom. 

To the brave men who responded to the country's call in the 
late war for the preservation of the Union of our fathers we are 
greatly indebted. Many — very many — of them went down in the 
struggle, but a grateful people, ever grateful for their devotion to 
the country and the flag, as spring-time returns, strew their graves 
with flowers and express the emotions of their hearts in the voice 
of poetry and eloquence. They died that the nation might live. 

"• They fell devoted, but undying — 
The very gales their names seem sighing; 
The meanest rill and the mightiest river 
Roll mingling with their fame forever." 

With all our prosperity and progress, my friends, this country 
has not been free from trouble. Instead of undisturbed peace, we 
have come along through these hundred years sorely vexed with 
trials and tribulations. A seven years' war to secure our inde- 
pendence ; a war in 1812 in which our national capital was burned 
to ashes ; the Mexican war in 1847, and finally the late great civil 
war, in which millions of men were engaged and hundreds of 
thousands slain. Thousands from our own State, as brave men 
and patriotic as ever stood in battle array, fell in defense of the 
flag. 

" They now lie low, no more to hear 
The victory shout or clashing steel ; 
No more of war's rude cares to hear ; 
No more kind sympathy to feel!" 



ORATION — HON. SHELBY M. CULLOM. G59 

The history of the country on almost every page furnishes us 
great examples of virtue and patriotism. • 

One of the greatest of British poets, in the light of history, 
looked at the great names of ancient and modern times, saw self- 
sacrificing virtue — looked at courage and ambition as they climbed 
every hill and scaled every summit of fame and glory — viewed 
them in history, in poetry, and in song — and as he looked, he ex- 
claimed : 

" Where shall the weary eye repose 
When gazing on the great — 
Where neither guilty glory glows 
Nor despicable state 1 
Yes, one — the first, the last, the best — 
The Cincinnatus of the West, 
Whom envy dare not hate, 
Bequeath the name of Washington 
To make man blush there was but one." 

You will allow me, my friends, to briefly refer to the life and 
character of Lincoln as another example of humble origin— early 
life veiled in necessity ; a flatboatman ; a rail-splitter ; self-educa- 
ted ; a back-woods merchant ; a surveyor ; sent to the Legislature; 
became a lawyer. Entering upon the discussion of legal and 
political questions, he displayed such power of analysis, logic and 
penetration, candor and ability, that ai* appreciating and admiring 
people finally placed him at the head of the nation. Entering 
upon the duties of that high office, surrounded by secret and open 
treason, he appealed to the patriotism and love of liberty of his 
countrymen, and with his hand on the helm of state, and his eye 
fixed upon the Union as his guiding star, he at last struck the 
chains from 4,000,000 of slaves, and invited them up on to the 
Declaration of Independence, and kept his way, through the storm 
and blood, defeat and disaster, until he made the port of peace with 
every star on that glorious banner. 

He heard the shouts of victory as they went up from the lips of 
millions of freemen. He expressed malice toward none — charity 
for all — a determination to pursue the right as God should permit 
him to see it, and passed away mourned by the lovers of liberty of 
every clime. 



660 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Such was an example of our own time. The Grecian mother 
might with much propriety point to Alexander and say to her son, 
be like him ; but with how much more propriety can an American 
mother say to her son — try and imitate the examples of Washington 
and Lincoln. 

Our fathers in laying the foundation of this Republic had respect 
for the rules of action which Infinite Wisdom designed for the 
government of His children. For the love of liberty is a part of 
man's nature, an instinct of the human love. 

The same infinite author that sent out the laws of light and heat 
and life and death, all the laws which control the forces of the 
universe, gave to man the love of liberty. 

The fires of liberty forever burn in the human breast. They 
may be smothered and lie buried beneath ages of oppression, but 
at some time or other, and at some place, they will break out and 
flame up to Heaven. 

In this age the fires of liberty burn brightly. The people in 
the nations are awaking to an understanding of their rights. In 
England the mass of the people are constantly demanding addi, 
tional rights. In France and Spain they are struggling to establish 
republican governments. In Russia the Czar grants new privileges 
to his subjects to prevent outbreaks ; and so the fires of liberty 
burn, and the influence of free government is seen and felt upon 
the world. • 

The first hundred years of our national independence have now 
passed away, and at this hour men and women of almost every 
nationality, with the trophies of science and art, of discovery and 
invention achieved in different parts of the civilized world, are met 
in honor of this centennial day around that old hall in the Quaker 
City, from which, one hundred years ago, first pealed out the glad 
anthems of liberty and independence. 

The men who were there then have all gone to their reward, 
but the government which they founded is still in the vigor of 
youth, and destined to perpetuate their names and fame through 
generations and centuries yet to come as the guardians, protectors, 
and benefactors of mankind. 

May it stand as long as the sun endures and the stars shall shine 
through the veil of night, and here may the victims of persecution, 



ORATION — nON. SHELBY M. CU1.LOM G01 

war, defeat, and disaster in every part of the world, after all their 
anxiety and toils, under the shelter of equal and impartial justice, 
find a peaceful home. 

"We enter this day upon the second century of our national 
existence. We are surrounded by circumstances calculated to 
inspire high hopes for the future. 

May prosperity and eternal progress attend this nation in the 
time to come. May every link added to the mighty chain of 
generations be worthy of the glorious past, and as year after year, 
and century upon century shall roll away, upon each return of this 
glad day may a prosperous, happy, united, and free people welcome 
to these shores the sun in his coming with martial music, the 
booming of cannon, the voice of eloquence and sons of freedom. 



ILLINOIS, RESOURCES AND RECORD. 

AN" ORATION BY CHARLES II. FOWLER, D.D., LL.D. 

Delivered at the centennial exposition, Philadelphia, aug. 
29, 187*3, at the request and by the appointment op his 
excellency, hon. j. l. beveridge, governor of the state 
of illinois. 

Mr. President, Fellow-Citizens of Illinois and of the 
Republic, Ladies and Gentlemen : — A peasant espoused a 
princess. She was heavily dowered and highly endowed. She had 
genius and culture. Her form was the perfection of symmetry. Her 
motion was the rhythm of poetry. Her face was the heauty of the 
morning. Her glance was the benediction that follows prayer. In 
repose she was a model. In motion she was a song. Seen, she was 
a hope ; detained, an inspiration ; retained, a transfiguration. The 
peasant went with her to a royal court where the guests were ex- 
pected to compete for an hour on the throne by showing their 
rarest treasures. A high courtier, seeing • the peasant empty- 
handed, yet hopeful, said, " Why hope ?" The peasant replied, " You 
have not seen her!" That court is this company of the assembled 
nations. That princess is the Prairie State, from the great valley 
beyond the mountains. When you have seen her you will not 
question my presence or my hope. I am here at your invitation, 
by the authority of yonder commonwealth, to commend to you, and 
through you to all men everywhere, the great State of Illinois, 
only fourth in population and not second in honor or promise 
among all the States of the great Republic. If you do not giant 
us this day a favorable verdict, I shall appeal to mankind, to im- 
partial history, and to the next Centennial. 

The soil seems predestined to greatness. Albert Gallatin, who 
has prepared the best work upon the Indian languages, says that 
" Illinois is from a Delaware word, Leno, or Leni, or Illini, which 
signifies the real or superior men." 



ORATION — CHARLES II. FOWI-ER, D.D., L.L.D. GG3 

Some of the vulgar may ask why the sons of Illinois are called 
Suckers, which, like nearly all nicknames, from Yankee to Wol- 
verine, is a term of disrespect. The answer is found in the jeal- 
ousies that always spring up in the presence of success. In the 
early days the settlers were in the habit of going up the river 
every spring to Galena, and, having worked in the famous lead 
mines during the summer, they returned down the river in the fall. 
This was the habit of suckers in the rivers. The transfer of the 
epithet was easy. It refers also to the poor whites from the South 
that followed the wealthy, like suckers on the corn. Its trans- 
formation has been certain. The nation has had abundant reason 
to bless the Suckers. 

In area the State has 55,410 square miles of territory. It is 
about 150 miles wide and 400 miles long, stretching in latitude 
from Maine to North 'California. It embraces a wide variety of 
climate. It is tempered on the north by the great inland, saltless. 
tideless sea, which keeps the thermometer from either extreme. 
Being a table land, 600 feet above the level of the sea, one is pre- 
pared to find on the health maps prepared by the general Govern- 
ment an almost clean and perfect record. In freedom from fevers 
and malarial diseases and consumptions, the three deadly enemies 
of the American Saxon, Illinois as a State stands without a supe- 
rior. She furnishes one of the essential conditions of a great 
people — sound bodies. I suspect that this fact lies back of that 
old Delaware word, Illini, superior men. 

The great battles of history that have been determinative of dy- 
nasties and destinies have been strategical battles, chiefly the ques- 
tion of position. Thermopylae has been the war-cry of freemen 
for twenty-four centuries. It only tells how much there may lie 
in position. All this advantage belongs to Illinois. It is in the 
heart of the greatest valley in the world, the vast region between 
the mountains — a valle} r that could feed mankind for a thousand 
years. It is well on toward the centre of the Continent. It is in the 
great temperate belt, in which have been found nearly all the ag- 
gressive civilizations of history. It has sixty-five miles of front- 
age on the head of the lake. With the Mississippi forming the 
western and southern boundary, with the Ohio running along the 
south-eastern line, with the Illinois River and Canal dividing the 



G64 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

State diagonally from the lake to the lower Mississippi, and with 
the Rock and Wabash Rivers furnishing altogether 2,000 miles of 
water-front, connecting with, and running through, in all, about 
12,000 miles of navigable waters. 

But this is not all. These waters are made most available by 
the fact that the lake and the State lie on the ridge running into 
the great valley from the east. Within cannon-shot of the lake 
the water runs away from the lake to the Gulf. The lake now 
empties at both ends, one into the Atlantic, the other into the 
Gulf of Mexico. The lake thus seems to hang over the land. 
This makes the dockage most serviceable ; there are no steep banks 
to damage it. Both lake and river are made for use. 

The climate varies from Portland to Richmond ; it favors every 
product of the Continent, including the tropics, with less than half- 
a-dozen exceptions. It produces every great nutriment of the 
world, except bananas and rice. It is hardly too much to say that 
it is the most productive spot know n to civilization. With the soil 
full of bread and the earth full of minerals, with an upper surface 
of food and an under layer of fuel, with perfect natural drainage 
and abundant springs and streams, and navigable rivers, half-way 
between the forests of the North and the fruits of the South, with- 
in a day's ride of the great deposits of iron, coal, copper, lead, and 
zinc, containing and controlling the great grain, cattle, pork, and 
lumber markets of the world, it is not strange that Illinois has the 
advantage of position. 

The next plateau in the advance of history is the coming of the 
white race, in the person of La Salle, who discovered the wide 
prairies of Illinois in 1670. Trained a Jesuit, and leading a 
business life, he saw at once the future field of the Church and of 
commerce. Three years later came two other noted characters, 
who, like La Salle, gave their heroic faith and purpose to the new 
land, and left their names on its early settlement — Joliet, a fur 
trader of Quebec, and Pere Marquette, a Jesuit of France. Coast- 
ing the northern shore of Lake Michigan, they entered Green Bay, 
ascended Fox River, crossed over into the Wisconsin River, thus 
taking France and Romanism into the Mississippi Valley a hun- 
dred years in advance of all rivals. A mile north of Evanston, on 
the old Green Bay road, I have stood upon a cVan-d and barren 



ORATION CHARLES H. FOWLER, D.D., LL.D. G65 

spot where Marquette planted the cross and built a church, two 
hundred years ago. Then it was on the shore of the lake ; now 
it is some distance inland. 

It is a good thing to plant in a country first a cross, and take 
possession of it in the spirit of missionaries and in the name of God. 
For conscience finally gains all battles. 

The first military occupation was at Fort Servecceur, in 1680. 

The first settlement in the Mississippi \ r alley, was in Illinois, 
at Fort St. Louis, on the Illinois River, in 1G82. Constructively, 
in the old way of constructing geographies and empires, Illinois 
was for one hundred years a part of Florida, ihough no Spaniard 
ever set foot on it. In 1675, it became a possession of the French 
crown, a dependency of Canada, and a part of Louisiana. In 1765 
the English flag was run up on old Fort Chartres, and Illinois 
was counted among the treasures of Great Britain. 

In 1779 it was taken from the English by Colonel Clark. This 
man was resolute in nature, wise in council, prudent in policy, 
bold in action, and heroic in danger. Few men who have figured 
in the history of America are more deserving than the colonel. 
Nothing short of first-rate, first-class ability could have rescued 
Vincens and all Illinois from the English. And it is not possible 
to over-estimate the influence of this achievement upon the Re- 
public. In 1779 Illinois became a part of Virginia. It was soon 
known as Illinois County. In 1784 Virginia ceded all this terri 
tory to the General Government, to be cut into States, to be 
Republican in form, with " the same right of sovereignty, freedom 
and independence as the other States." 

In 1787 it was the subject of perhaps the wisest and ablest 
legislation found in any merely human records. No mau can 
study the secret history of the "Compact of 1787," and not feel 
that Providence was guiding with sleepless eye these unborn 
States. The ordinance that on July 13, 1787, finally became the 
incorporating act, has a most marvellous history. Jefferson had 
vainly tried to secure a system of Government for the North- 
western territory. He was an emancipationist of that day, and 
favored the exclusion of slavery from the territory Virginia had 
ceded to the General Government ; but the South voted him down as 
often as it came up, In 1787, as late as July 10, an organizing 



6f)fi OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

act without the anti-slavery clause was pending. This concession 
to the South was expected to cany it. Congress was in session in 
New York City. On July 5, Rev. Dr. Manasseh Cutler, of 
Massachusetts, came into New York to lobby on the North-western 
Territory. Everything seemed to fall into his hands. Events 
were ripe. 

The state of the public credit, the growing of Southern prejudice, 
the basis of his mission, his personal character, all combined to 
complete one of these sudden and marvellous revolutions in public- 
sentiment that once in five or ten centuries are seen to sweep over 
a country like the breath of the Almighty. Cutler was a graduate 
of Yale — received his A. M. from Harvard, and his D. D. from 
Yale. He had studied and taken degrees in the three learned 
professions, medicine, law, and divinity. lie had thus America's 
best indorsement. He had published a scientific examination of 
the plants of New England. His name stood second only to that 
of Franklin as a scientist in America. He was a courtly gentleman 
of the old style, a man of commanding presence, and of inviting 
face. The Southern members said they had never seen such a 
gentleman in the North. He came representing a company that 
desired to purchase a tract of land now included in Ohio, for the 
purpose of planting a colony. It was a speculation. Government 
money was worth eighteen cents on the dollar. This Massachu- 
setts company had collected enough to purchase 1,500,000 acres of 
land. Other speculators in New York made Dr. Cutler their 
agent, (lobbyist) ; on the 12th he represented a demand for 5,500,- 
000 acres. This would reduce the National debt. Jefferson and 
Virginia were regarded as authority concerning the land Virginia 
had just ceded. Jefferson's policy wanted to provide for the pub- 
lic credit, and this was a good opportunity to do something. 
Massachusetts then owned the territory of Maine, which she was 
crowding on to the market. She was opposed to opening the 
North-western region. This fired the zeal of Virginia. The 
South caught the inspiration, and all exalted Dr. Cutler. The 
English Minister invited him to dine with some of the Southern 
gentlemen. He was the center of interest. 

The entire South rallied round him. Massachusetts could not 
yote against him, because many of the constituents of her members 



ORATION — CHARLES H. FOWLER, D. D., LL. D. 007 

were interested personally in the Western speculations. Thus 
Cutler, making friends with the South, and, doubtless, using all 
the arts of the body, was enabled to command the situation. True 
to deeper convictions, he dictated one of the most compact and 
finished documents of wise statesmanship that lias ever adorned 
any human law book. lie borrowed from Jefferson the term 
"Articles of Compact," which, preceding the Federal Constitution, 
rose into the most sacred character. He then followed very closely 
the Constitution of Massachusetts, adopted three years before. Its 
most marked points were, 

1. The exclusion of slavery from the territory forever. 

2. Provision for public schools, giving one township for a semi- 
nary, and every section numbered sixteen in each township ; that 
is, one thirty-sixth of all the land for Public Schools. 

3. A provision prohibiting the adoption of any constitution, or 
the enactment of any law that should nullify pre-existing contracts. 

Be it forever remembered that this Compact declared that 
" Religion, morality, and knowledge being necessary to good govern- 
ment and the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of educa- 
tion shall always be encouraged." 

Dr. Cutler planted himself on this platform, and would not yield. 
Giving his unqualified declaration that it was that or nothing — 
that unless they could make the land desirable they did not want 
it — he took his horse and buggy, and started for the Constitutional 
Convention in Philadelphia. On July 13, 1787, the bill was put 
upon its passage, and was unanimously adopted, every Southern 
member voting for it, and only one man. Mr. Yates, of New York, 
voting against it. But as the States voted as States. Yates lost 
his vote, and the Compact was put beyond repeal. Thus the 
great States of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan and Wisconsin — 
a vast empire, the heart of the great valley — was consecrated to 
freedom, intelligence and honesty. Thus the great heart of the 
nation was prepared for a year and a day and an hour. In the 
light of these eighty-nine years I affirm that this act was the sal- 
vation of the Republic and the destruction of slavery. Soon the 
South saw their great blunder, and tried to repeal the Compact. 
In 1803 Congress referred it to a committee of which John Ran- 
dolph was chairman. He reported that this ordinance was a 



668 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Compact, and opposed repeal. Thus it stood, a rock, in the way 
of the on-rushing sea of slavery. 

The population, of 12,282, that occupied the territory in A. D. 
1800, increased to 45,000 in A. D. 1818, when the State Consti- 
tution was adopted, and Illinois took her place in the Union, with 
a star on the flag and two votes in the Senate. 

Shadrack Bond, a farmer, was the first Governor, and in his 
first message he recommended the construction of the Illinois and 
Michigan Canal. 

The simple economy in those days is seen in the fact that 
the entire bill for stationery for the first session of the Legislature 
was only $13.50. Yet this simple body actually enacted a very 
superior code. 

There was no money in the territory before the war of 1812. 
Deer-skins and coon-skins were the circulating medium. In 1821 
the Legislature ordained a State bank on the credit of the State. 
It issued notes in the likeness of bank-bills. These notes 
were made a legal tender for everything, and the bank was 
ordered to loan to the people $100 on personal security, and 
more on mortgages. They actually passed a resolution requesting 
the Secretary of the Treasury of the United States to receive 
these notes for land. The old French Lieutenant-Governor, Col. 
Menard, put the resolution as follows : " Gentlemen of de 
Senate : It is moved and seconded dat de notes of dis bank be 
made land-office money. All in favor of dat motion say Aye ; all 
against it say No. It is decided in de affirmative. Now, gen- 
tlemen, I bet you one hundred dollars he never be land-office 
money ! " Hard sense, like hard money, is always above par. 

The old Frenchman presents a fine figure up against the 
dark back-ground of most of his nation. They made no progress. 
They clung to their earliest and simplest implements. They never 
wore hats or caps. They pulled their blankets over their heads 
in the winter like the Indians, with whom they freely intermarried. 

One of the great elements in the early development of Illinois 
is the Illinois and Michigan Canal, connecting the Illinois and 
Mississippi River with the Lakes. It was of the utmost impor- 
tance to the State. It was recommended by Governor Bond, the 
first Governor, in his first message. In 1821 the Legislature 



OttATION — CHARLES H. FOWLER, D.D., LL.D. 669 

appropriated $10,000 for surveying the route. Two bright 
young engineers surveyed it, and estimated the cost at $600,000 
or $700,000. It finally cost $8,000,000. In 1825 a law was 
passed to incorporate the Canal Company, but no stock was 
sold. In 1826, upon the solicitation of Cook, Congress gave 
300,000 acres of land on the line of the work. In 1828 another 
law — commissioners appointed, and work commenced, with new 
survey and new estimates. In 1834-35 George Farquhar made 
an able report on the whole matter. This was, doubtless, the 
ablest report ever made to a Western Legislature, and it became 
the model for subsequent reports and action. From this the 
work went on till it was finished, in 1848. It cost the State 
a large amount of money ; but it gave to the industries of 
the State an impetus that pushed it up into the first rank of 
greatness. It was not built as a speculation any more than a 
doctor is employed on a speculation. But it has paid into the 
treasury of the State an average annual net sum of over $111,000 

Pending the construction of the Canal, the land and town- 
lot fever broke out in the State, in 1834-35. It took on the 
malignant type in Chicago, lifting the town up into a city. The 
disease spread over the entire State and adjoining States. It was 
epidemic. It cut up men's farms without regard to locality, and cut 
up the purses of the purchasers without regard to consequences. It 
is estimated that building lots enough were sold in Illinois alone 
to accommodate every citizen then in the United States. 

Towns and cities were exported to the Eastern market by 
the ship-load. There was no lack of buyers. Every up-ship 
came freighted with speculators and their money. 

This distemper seized upon the Legislature in 1836-37, and left 
not one to tell the tale. They enacted a system of inter- 
nal improvement without a parallel in the grandeur of its 
conception. They ordered the construction of 1,300 miles of 
railroad, crossing the State in all directions. This was surpassed 
by the river and canal improvements. There were a few counties 
not touched by either railroad, or river, or canal, and these were 
to be comforted and compensated for their misfortune by the 
free distribution of $200,000 among them. To inflate this balloon 
beyond credence it was ordered that work should be commenced on 



070 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

both ends of each of these railroads and rivers, and at each river- 
crossing, all at the same time. The appropriations for these vast 
improvements were over $12,000,000, and Commissioners were 
appointed to borrow the money on the credit of the State. Remem- 
ber that all this was in the early days of railroading, when railroads 
were luxuries ; that the State had whole counties with scarcely a 
cabin ; and that the population of the State was less than 400,000, 
and you can form some idea of the vigor with which'these brave 
men undertook the work of making a great State. In the light 
of history 1 am compelled to say that this was only a premature 
throb of the power that actually slumbered in the soil of the 
State. It was Hercules in the cradle. 

At this junction the State bank loaned its funds largely to God- 
frey Oilman & Co., and to other leading houses, for the purpose 
of drawing trade from St. Louis to Alton. Soon they failed and 
took down the bank with them. 

In 1840 all hope seemed gone. A population of 480,000 were 
loaded with a debt of $14,000,000. It had only six small cities, 
really only towns, namely, Chicago, Alton, Springfield, Quincy, 
Galena, Nauvoo. This debt was to be cared for when there was 
not a dollar in the treasury, and when the State had borrowed 
itself out of all credit, and when there was not good money enough 
in the hands of all the people to pay the interest of the debt for 
a single year. Yet, in the presence of all these difficulties, the 
young State steadily refused to repudiate. Governor Ford took 
hold of the problem and solved it, bringing the State through in 
triumph. 

Having touched lightly upon some of the more distinctive points 
in the history of the development of Illinois, let us next briefly 
consider the material resources of the State. It is a garden four 
hundred miles long and one hundred and fifty miles wide. Its 
soil is chiefly a black sandy loam, from six inches to sixty feet 
thick. On the American bottoms it has been cultivated for one 
hundred and fifty years without renewal. About the old French 
towns it has yielded corn for a century and a half without rest or 
help. It produces nearly everything grown in the temperate and 
tropical zones. She leads all other States in the number of acres 
actually under plow. Her pi > hi -ts from "25,000,000 of acres are 



ORATION — REV. CHARLES H. FOWLER, D.D., LL.D. 671 

incalculable. Her mineral wealth is scarcely second to her agricul- 
tural power. She has coal, iron, lead, copper, zinc, many varieties 
of building stone, fire clay, china clay, common brick clay, sand of 
all kinds, gravel, mineral paint — everything needed for a high 
civilization. Left to herself, she has the elements of all greatness. 
The single item of coal is too vast for any appreciative handling in 
figures. We can handle it in general terms, like algebraical signs, 
but long before we get up into the millions and billions the human 
mind drops down from comprehension to mere symbolic apprehen- 
sion. 

When I tell you that nearly four-fifths of the entire State is 
underlaid with a deposit of coal more than forty feet thick on the 
average, (now estimated, by recent surveys, at seventy feet thick,) 
you can get some idea of its amount, as you do of the amount of 
the national debt. There it is! 41,000 square miles — one vast 
mine into which you could put many of the States ; in which you 
could bury scores of European and ancient empires, and have room 
enough all round to work without knowing that they had been 
sepulchered there. Put this vast coal-bed down by the other great 
coal deposits of the world, and its importance becomes manifest. 
Great Britain has 12,000 square miles of coal ; Spain, 3,000 : 
France, 1,719 ; Belgium, 578 ; Illinois about twice as many square 
miles as all combined. Virginia has 20,000 square miles; Penn- 
sylvania, 16.000; Ohio, 12,000. Illinois has 41,000 square miles. 
One-seventh of all the known coal on this Continent is in Illinois. 

Could we sell the coal in this single State for one-seventh of one 
cent a ton, it would pay the national debt. Converted into power, 
even with the wastage in our common engines, it would do more 
work than could be done by the entire race, beginning at Adam's 
wedding, and working ten hours a day through all the centuries till 
the present time, and right on into the future at the same rate, for 
the next 600,000 years. 

Great Britain uses enough mechanical power to-day to give to 
each man, woman, and child in the kingdom the help and service 
of nineteen untiring servants. No wonder she has leisure and 
luxuries. No wonder the home of the common artisan has in it 
more comforts and luxuries than could be found in the palace of 
good old King Arthur. Think, if you can conceive of it, of the 



672 OUfc NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

vast army of servants that slumber in the soil of Illinois, impa- 
tiently awaiting the call of Genius to come forth to minister to our 
comfort. 

At the present rate of consumption England's coal supply will 
be exhausted in 250 years. When this is gone she must transfer 
her dominion either to the Indies ; or to British America, which I 
would not resist; or to some other people, which I would regret as 
loss to civilization. Coal is King. At the same rate of consump- 
tion (which far exceeds our own) the deposit of coal in Illinois 
will last 120,000 years. And her kingdom shall be an everlasting 
kingdom. 

Let us turn now from this reserve power to the annual products 
of the State. We shall not be humiliated in this field. Here we 
strike the secret of our national credit. Nature provides a market 
in the constant appetite of the race. Men must eat, and if we can 
furnish the provisions we can command the treasure. All that a 
man hath will he give for his life. 

According to the last census Illinois produced 30,000,000 of 
bushels of wheat. That is more wheat than was raised by any 
other State in the Union. She raised last year 130,000,000 of 
bushels of corn — twice as much as any other State, and one-sixth 
of all the corn raised in the United States. She harvested 
2,747,000 tons of hay, nearly one-tenth of all the hay in the Re- 
public. It is not generally appreciated, but it is true, that the hay 
crop of the country is worth more than the cotton crop. The hay 
of Illinois equals the cotton of Louisiana. Go to Charleston, 
S. C, and see them peddling handfuls of hay or grass, almost as a 
curiosity, as we regard Chinese gods or the cryolite of Greenland ; 
drink your coffee and condensed milk ; and walk back from the coast 
for many a league through the sand and burs till you get up into 
the better atmosphere of the mountains, without seeing a waving 
meadow or a grazing herd ; then you will begin to appreciate the 
meadows of the Prairie State, where the grass often grows sixteen 
feet high. 

The value of her farm implements is $211,000,000, and the 
value of her live stock is only second to the great State of New 
York. Last year she had 25,000,000 hogs, and packed 2,113,845, 
about one-half of all that were packed in the United States. This 



ORATION CHARLES H. FOWLER, D.D., LL.D. 673 

is no insignificant item. Pork is a growing demand of the 
old world. Since the laborers of Europe have gotten a taste 
of our bacon, and we have learned how to pack it dry in boxes, 
like dry goods, the world has become the market. The hog is on 
the march into the future. His nose is ordained to uncover the 
secrets of dominion, and his feet shall be guided by the star ot 
Empire. 

Illinois marketed $57,000,000 worth of slaughtered animals — 
more than any other State, and a seventh of all the States. 

Be patient with me, and pardon my pride, and I will give you a 
list of some of the things in which Illinois excels all other States. 

Depth and richness of soil ; per cent, of good ground ; acres of 
improved land ; large farms — some farms contain from 40,000 to 
00,000 acres of cultivated land, 40,000 acres of corn on a single 
farm ; number of farmers ; amount of wheat, corn, oats, and honey 
produced ; value of animals for slaughter ; number of hogs ; amount 
of pork ; number of horses ; three times as many as Kentucky, 
the Horse State. 

Illinois excels all other States in miles of railroad and miles of 
postal service, and in money orders sold per annum, and in the 
amount of lumber sold in her markets. 

Illinois is only second in many important matters. This sample 
list comprises a few of the more important : Permanent school 
fund, (good for a young State ;) total income for educational pur- 
poses ; number of publishers of books, maps, papers, etc. ; value of 
farm products and implements, and of live stock; in tons of coal 
mined. 

The shipping of Illinois is only second to New York. Out of 
port during the business hours of the season of navigation she 
sends forth a vessel every ten minutes. This does not include 
canal boats, which go one every minute. No wonder she is only 
eecond in number of bankers and brokers, or in physicians and 
surgeons. 

She is third in colleges, teachers, and schools ; cattle, lead, hay, 
flax, sorghum, and beeswax. 

She is fourth in population, in children enrolled in public schools, 
in law schools, in butter, potatoes, and carriages. 

She is fifth in value of real and personal property, in theological 



674 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

seminaries and colleges exclusively for women, in milk sold, and in 
boots and shoes manufactured, and in book-binding. 

She is only seventh in the production of wood, while she is the 
twelfth in area. Surely that is well done for the Prairie State. 
She now has much more wood and growing timber than she had 
thirty years ago. 

A few leading industries will justify emphasis. She manufac- 
tures $205,000,000 worth of goods, which places her well up to- 
ward New York and Pennsylvania. The number of her manufac- 
turing establishments increased from 18G0 to 1870, 300 per cent.; 
capital employed increased 350 per cent., and the amount of pro- 
duct increased 400 per cent. She issued 5,500,000 copies com- 
mercial and financial newspapers — only second to New York. The 
Tribune, in the hands of Medill, and the Times, under Story, and 
the Inter-Ocean, are not second to any for ability and push. She 
has 6,759 miles of railroad, thus leading all other States, worth 
$636,458,000, using 3,245 engines, and 67,712 cars, making a 
train long enough to cover one-tenth of the entire road. Her 
stations are only five miles apart. She carried last year 15,795,000 
passengers, an average of thirty-six and a half miles, or equal to 
taking her entire population twice across the State. More than 
two-thirds of her land is within five miles of a railroad, and less 
than two per cent, is more than fifteen miles away. 

But little mob violence has ever been felt in the State. In 
1817 Regulators disposed of a band of horse thieves that infested 
the territory. The Mormon indignities finally awoke the same 
spirit. Alton was also the scene of a pro-slavery mob, in which 
Lovejoy was added to the list of martyrs. The moral sense of 
the people makes the law supreme, and gives to the State unruf- 
fled peace. 

With $22,300,000 in Church property and 4,298 Church organ- 
izations, the State has that divine police, the sleepless patrol of 
moral ideas, that alone is able to secure perfect safety. Con- 
science takes the knife from the assassin's hand and the bludgeon 
from the grasp of the highwayman. We sleep in safety, not 
because we are behind bolts and bars — these only fence against 
the innocent; not because a lone officer drowses on a distant cor- 
ner of a street ; not because a sheriff may call his posse from a 



ORATION— CHARLES H. FOWLEti, 1>.I>., LL.D. 675 

remote part of the country ; but because Conscience guards the 
very portals of the air, and stirs in the deepest recesses of the 
public mmd. This spirit issues within the State 9,500,000 copies 
of religious papers annually, and receives still more from without. 
Thus the crime of the State is only one-fourth that of New York, 
and one-half that of Pennsylvania. 

Illinois never had but one duel between her own citizens. In 
Belleville, in 1820, Alphonso Stewart and William Bennett 
arranged to vindicate injured honor. The seconds agreed to make 
it a sham and make them shoot blanks. Stewart was in the secret. 
Bennett mistrusted something, and, unobserved, slipped a bullet 
into his gun and killed Stewart. He then fled the State. After 
two years he was caught, tried, convicted, and, in spite of friends 
and political aid, was hung. This fixed the code of honor, and 
terminated its use in Illinois. 

The early preachers wen; ignorant men, who were accounted 
eloquent according to the strength of their voices. But they set 
the style for all public speakers. Lawyers and political speakers 
followed this rule. Gov. Ford says : " Nevertheless, these first 
preachers were of incalculable benefit to the country. They 
inculcated justice and morality. To them are we indebted for the 
first Christian character of the Protestant portion of the people." 

In education Illinois surpasses her material resources. The 
ordinance of 1787 consecrated one thirty-sixth of her soil to com- 
mon schools, and the law of 1818, the first law that went upon her 
statutes, gave three per cent, of all the rest to education instead of 
highways. The old compact secures this interest forever, and by its 
yoking morality and intelligence it precludes the legal interference 
with the Bible in the public schools. With such a start it is nat- 
ural that we should have 11,050 public schools, and that our illit- 
eracy should be less than New York or Pennsylvania, and only 
about one-half of Massachusetts. We are not to blame for not 
having more than one-half as many idiots as the great States. 
These public schools soon made colleges inevitable. The first 
college, still flourishing, was started in Lebanon, 1828, by the 
M. E. Church, and named after Bishop M'Kendree. Illinois 
College, at Jacksonville, supported by the Presbyterians, followed, 
in 1830. In 1832, the Baptists built Shurtliff College at Alton. 



67G OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Then the Presbyterians built Knox College, at Gallesburgh, in 
1838, and the Episcopalians built Jubilee College, at Peoria, in 1847. 
After these early years colleges have rained down. A settler could 
hardly encamp on the prairie but colleges would spring up by his 
wagon. The State now has one very well endowed and equipped 
university, namely, the North-western University, at Evanston, 
with six colleges, ninety instructors, over 1,000 students, and 
$1,500,000 endowment. 

Rev. J. M. Peck was the first educated Protestant minister 
in the State. He settled at Rock Spring, in St. Clair County, 
1820, and left his impress on the State. Before 1837 only party 
papers were published, but Mr. Peck published a Gazetteer of 
Illinois. Soon after John Russell, of Bluffdale, published essays 
and tales showing genius. Judge James Hall published the Illi- 
nois Monthly Magazine with great ability, and an annual, called 
The Western Souvenir, which gave him an enviable fame all over 
the United States. From these beginnings Illinois has gone on 
till she has more volumes in public libraries even than Massachu- 
setts, and of the 44,500,000 volumes in all the public libraries of 
the United States, she has one-thirteenth. In newspapers she 
stands fourth. Her increase is marvellous. In 1850 she issued 
5,000,000 copies: in 1860,27,500,000; in 1870,113,140,000. 
In 1860 she had eighteen colleges and seminaries; in 1870 she 
had eighty. That is a grand advance for the war decade. 

This brings us to a record unsurpassed in the history of any age, 

THE WAR RECORD OF ILLINOIS. 

I hardly know where to begin, or how to advance, or what to 
say. I can at best give you only a broken synopsis of her deeds, 
and you must put them in the order of glory for yourself. Her 
sons have always been foremost on fields of danger. In 1832-33, 
at the call of Gov. Reynolds, her sons drove Blackhawk over the 
Mississippi. One call was enough. When the Mexican war came, 
in May, 1846, 8,370 men offered themselves when only 3,720 could 
be accepted. The fields of Buena Vista and Vera Cruz, and the 
storming of Cerro Gordo, will carry the glory of Illinois soldiers 
long after the infamy of the cause they served has been forgotten. 
But it was reserved. till our day for her sons to find a field and 
cause and foemen that could fitly illustrate their spirit and heroism. 



ORATION — CHARLES II. FOWLER, D.D., LL.D. 077 

Illinois put into her own regiments for the IT. S. Government 
256,000 men, and into the army through other States enough to 
swell the number to 290,000. This far exceeds all the soldiers of 
the Federal Government in all the war of the Revolution. Her 
total years of service were over G00,000. She enrolled men from 
eighteen to forty-five years of age when the law of Congress in 
1864 — the test time — only asked for those from twenty to forty 
five. Her enrollment was otherwise excessive. Her people wanted 
to go, and did not take the pains to correct the enrollment. Thus 
the hasis of fixing the quota was too great, and then the quota 
itself, at least in the trying time, was far above any other state. 

Thus the demand on some counties, as Monroe, for example, 
took every able-bodied man in the county, and then did not have 
enough to fill the quota. Moreover, Illinois sent 20,844 men for 
ninety or one hundred days for whom no credit was asked. When 
Mr. Lincoln's attention was called to the inequality of the quota 
compared with other States, he replied, "The country needs the 
sacrifice. We must put the whip on the free horse." In spite of 
all these disadvantages Illinois gave to the country 73,000 years of 
service above all calls. With one-thirteenth of tin; population of 
the loyal States, she sent regularly one-tenth of all the soldiers, 
and in the peril of the closing calls, when patriots were few and 
weary, she then sent one-eighth of all that were called for by her 
loved and honored son in the White House. Her mothers and 
daughters went into the fields to raise the grain and keep the 
children together, while the fathers and older sons went to the 
harvest fields of the world. I know a father and four sons who 
agreed that one of them must stay at home : and they pulled 
straws from a stack to see who might go. The father was left. 
The next day he came into camp, saying ''Mother says she can 
get the crops in, and I am going, too." I know large Methodist 
Churches from which every male member went to the army. Do 
you want to know what these heroes from Illinois did in the field ? 
Ask any soldier with a good record of his own, who is thus able to 
judge, and he will tell you that the Illinois men went in to win. 
It is common history that the great victories were won in the 
west. When everything else looked dark Illinois was gaining 
victories all down the river, and dividing the Confederacy. Slier- 



678 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

man took with him on his great march forty-five regiments of 
Illinois infantry, three companies of artillery, and one company of 
cavalry. He could not avoid going to the sea. ]f he had been 
killed I doubt not the men would have gone right on. There was 
hardly an Illinois regiment in the field that did not have brains 
enough to set up and run any Government on earth. Lincoln 
answered all rumors of Sheridan's defeat with "It is impossible; 
there is a mighty sight of fight in 100,000 Western men." Illinois 
soldiers brought home 300 battle flags. The first United States 
flasr that floated over Richmond was an Illinois flaw. Illinois 
tested her courage in the supreme trial. She gave 875 victims 
to the fiends at Andersonville. Let us cover our faces as the 
shadowy skeletons of these silent and uncomplaining heroes — our 
mothers' sons — pass by to join the company of the glorious dead. 
The sight is not a means of grace. God grant that just retribution 
may be averted from the chivalry, who might have prevented this 
most cowardly and most beastly brutality of all history I 

It is a relief to turn from this scene to another, in which the 
great state of Illinois is sending messengers to every field and 
hospital, to care for her sick and wounded sons. She said, "These 
suffering ones are my sons, and 1 will care for them," 

When individuals had given all, then cities and towns came 
forward with their credit to the extent of many millions, to aid 
these men and their families. 

Nothing can be said or done in honor of Illinois soldiers better 
than to repeat the story of their deeds. As we gaze upon the 
luminous page of their history the first form that comes out of the 
smoke of battle and rises in the chariot of fire before our weeping 
eyes, is that one solitary hero, who, at the first tap of the war 
drums, sprang from the couch of his ease and the home of his com- 
fort, armed amid the gathering darkness of impending peril took a 
hasty farewell of wife and loved ones, and went forth to hunt for 
masked batteries in the darkness and to die, if need be, rather than 
survive his imperilled liberties ; who actually bared his bosom to 
storms of iron and rows of glistening steel ; who did press over the 
breastwork and rush over slippery fields, and stand mute under 
hostile guns ; who did actually stand in death's highway that the 
Republic might be saved. I see first of all, and, in the impartial 



ORATION — CHARLES II. FOWLER, D.D., LL.D. 679 

judgment of infinite equity, above all, the one solitary hero of the 
war, the Common Soldier. Honor to whom honor is due. 

Next I see the women of America, in the person of the mother. 
This is she who was in the heat of battle every hour ; who never 
knew what each caller had come to break to her ; who seldom 
slept on a dry pillow when the babe she had nursed might have 
none for his dying head ; who, with a heroism never needed by 
the soldier in action, dressed her boy with reference to having his 
body robbed after the battle, and who said, like the Spartan mother 
handing her son his shield, " "With it, or upon it." When the 
awards are made for actual service, this one shall not lack mon- 
ument or crown or throne. 

I do not lose sight of another character, upon whom rested the 
care and burden of responsibility ; who shared the trench with the 
soldier, and fared on the same half biscuit ; who was watching and 
planning while the soldier slept. I do not lose sight of the officer, 
who deserved all the honor he received. Illinois furnished her full 
share of these burden-bearers. See what a list of heroes : one 
general — all the country needed — seven major-generals, eighteen 
brevet major-generals, forty-five brigadier-generals, and 120 brevet 
brigadier-generals. See what names they bear to posterity! Two 
Titans to-day in the Senate : J. A. Logan, who faced 20,000 
majority in his own district in Egypt, and carried it all over to the 
loyal cause ; who moved on the field of battle like a thunderbolt ; 
whose voice rings in the Senate with no uncertain sound, who sees 
the core of things, and calls them by their right names ; who first 
comprehended the situation when restored rebels had seized upon 
the Government ; who adds to the courage of the soldier and the 
wisdom of the statesman the loyalty of a patriot and the faith of a 
Christian. 

By him stands stout Senator Oglesby, whose victories and wounds 
do him perpetual honor. Here too, is the present Governor of 
Illinois, J. L. Beverage, who, in the storm of battle, was wont to 
say as he rode up and down in the thickest of the fight, " There 
is a God in Israel " — a man whom the State is glad to honor. May 
I pause to name such men as Rawlins, who organized the armies, 
and secured victory in advance ? Governor Palmer, General White 
General Wallace, General M' Arthur. Colonel Mulligan, and Wil 



G80 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Ham Pitt Kellogg? Party spirit will die, and the future will 
vindicate this man. Surely this list could he continued with satis- 
faction, but — I desist. 

I am now brought to another name that needs no mention here. 
I wish to speak with due deliberation, and for the hour lift myself 
out of the smoke and heat of party politics, up into the pure air 
and clarified visions of imj^artial history. Studying the theme from 
that stand-point which respects only achievements and weighs only 
results, I stand in the presence of the one supreme military com- 
mander of this century, Ulysses S. Grant, the Tanner of Illi- 
nois. History will not forget that this man fought more than a 
score of great battles, and won more than a score of great victories, 
before he went to the East to turn the tide there in favor of the 
Union ; that he never turned his back on the foe ; that he only, of 
all our commanders, never lost a battle ; that he gained nearly all 
the great victories that were gained ; that he made his way to the 
supreme command with no aid but his sword, and held it to the end 
without a blunder or a defeat. 

On these facts impartial history will do what we all did when our 
brothers and sons were with him in the field — give him the first 
place of honor and confidence. This is no place for party discus- 
sion, and I shall not trespass on the proprieties of this hour. This 
I will say, that, when the annoyances of the day are passed, and 
posterity studies our sorrows, the great outlines of his administra- 
tion will not dim his military glory ; and his treaty of Washington 
will be held by the confederated Republics of all lands, gathered 
in the coming future, as the first great achievement that made their 
peaceful relations possible — as we now hold the Declaration of 
Independence. 

Nothing is more useless in the work of life than a hiltless sword. 
It is all edge and metal, with no way to utilize its power. All you 
can do with it is to hang it up in your Memorial Hall, to await the 
worship of your grandsons. So it is with ex-Presidents. Full of 
edge and metal, they lack use. Place them, then, in the Halls of 
History, and a grateful posterity, inheriting liberties so bravely 
defended, will venerate each scar, and niche, and rust spot from 
foeman's blood. Illinois turns from the past to the future, confi- 
denly awaiting that supreme judgment that must place upon the 



ORATION CHARLES II. FOWLER, D. D., LL. D. 081 

brow of her great Captain the chaplet to which none other has yet 
attained. 

One other name from Illinois comes np in all minds embalmed in 
all hearts, that must have the supreme place in this story of our 
glory and of our nation's honor ; that name is Abraham Lincoln, 7 
OF Illinois. Neither you nor that great commonwealth beyond 
the mountains that has sent me here would pardon me for not 
giving both time and space to this grandest character of American 
history. 

The analysis of Mr. Lincoln's character is difficult on account of 
its symmetry. Its comprehension is to us impossible on account 
of its immensity, for a man can be comprehended only by his peers. 
Though we may not get its altitude, nor measure its girth, nor 
fathom its depths, nor estimate its richness, we may stretch our 
little selves up against it, and get somewhat of the impress of its 
purity, the inspiration of its heroism, and the impulse of its power. 
It was centered about a few strong points. His moral sense, his 
reason, and his common sense, were the three fixed points through 
which the perfect circle of his character was drawn — the sacred 
trinity of his great manhood. Had he lacked either of these he 
would have failed, and we would have been buried in the ruins of 
the Republic. Without the first, he would have been a villain ; 
without the second, a bigot or a fool ; without the third, a fanatic 
or a dreamer. With them all, he was Abraham Lincoln. 

In this age we look with admiration at his uncompromising 
honesty. And well we may, for this saved us. Thousands through- 
out the length and breadth of the country who knew him only as 
" Honest Old Abe," voted for him on that account ; and wisely 
did they choose, for no other man could have carried us through 
the fearful night of the war. When his plans were too vast for 
our comprehension, and his faith in the cause too sublime for our 
participation ; when it was all night about us, and all dread before 
us, and all sad and desolate behind us ; when not one ray shone 
upon our cause ; when traitors were haughty and exultant at the 
South, and fierce and blasphemous at the North ; when the loyal 
men here seemed almost in the minority ; when the stoutest hearts 
quailed, the bravest cheeks paled ; when generals were defeating 
each other for place, and contractors were leeching out the very 



682 OUli NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

heart's blood of tlie prostrate Republic ; when every thing else had 
failed us, we looked at this calm, patient man standing- like a rock 
in the storm, and said, " Mr. Lincoln is honest, and we can trust 
him still." Holding to this single point with the energy of faith 
and despair we held together, and, under God, he brought us 
through to victory. 

He was the representative character of this age. He incarnated 
the ideal Republic. No other man ever so fully embodied the 
purposes, the affections, and the power of the people. He came 
up among us. He was one of us. His birth, his education, his 
habits, his motives, his feelings, and his ambitions, were all our 
own. Had he been born among hereditary aristocrats he would 
not have been our President. But born in the cabin, and reared 
in the field and in the forest, he became the Great Commoner. 
The classics of the schools might have polished him, but they 
would have separated him from us. But trained in the common 
school of adversity, his calloused palms never- slipped from the poor 
man's hand. A child of the people, he was as accessible in the 
AVhite House as he had been in the cabin. 

His practical wisdom made him the wonder of all lands. With 
such certainty did Mr. Lincoln follow causes to their ultimate 
effects, that his foresight of contingencies seemed almost prophetic. 
While we in turn were calling him weak and stubborn and blind, 
Europe was amazed at his statesmanship, and awed into silence by 
the grandeur of his plans. Measured by what he did, Mr. Lincoln 
is a statesman without a peer. He stands alone in the world. He 
came to the government by a minority vote. Without an army, 
without a navy, without money, without munitions, he stepped into 
the midst of the most stupendous, most wide-spread, most thorough- 
ly equipped and appointed, most deeply planned and infamous, 
rebellion of all history. Traitors were in every department. 
Treason was the rule, loyalty was the exception. He was alone 
in Washington ; armed foes were close at hand ; his friends were 
away yonder in the North, and traitors hissed and rattled all over 
the loyal States. He conciliated rivals, united friends, flanked 
politicians, marshalled Wall-street, defeated Copperheads, and 
conquered foes. He stamped upon the earth, and two millions of 
armed men leaped forward. He spoke to the sea, and the mightiest 



ORATION — CHARLES IT. FOWLER, D.D., LL.D. 683 

navy the world ever saw crowned every wave. lie breathed into 
the air, and money and munitions rained upon the people. 

Taken all and in all, he rises head and shoulders above every 
other man of six thousand years. I would not pluck one laurel 
from the statues of the noble dead ; I would rather place in their 
midst another statue that shall adorn and honor their glorified 
company. We are, indeed, too near Mr. Lincoln to award him the 
glory he deserves. We remember too well his long, lank form? 
his awkward movements, to realize that this man, standing among 
us like a father, yet looms above us like a monarch. I turn to the 
past ; I see behind me a noble company. There is Napoleon, the 
man of destiny. Armies move at his bid as if they were the 
muscles of his body ; kings rise and fall at his nod ; but he lived 
for himself. His entire life was a failure. He did not accomplish 
one of his great purposes. I see a Wellington ; great as a military 
chieftain, competent to command armies against a foreign and 
hereditary foe. I see Marlborough ; but on every stone of his 
monument and in every page of his history I see the frauds by 
which he enriched himself from the plunder of his country. There 
is Cromwell — a line old man, England's noblest son ; but his arena 
was small, the work he undertook limited, the work he accomplish- 
ed ephemeral. The revolution from the hereditary kingdom of 
the Stuarts to the hereditary dictatorship of the Cromwells was 
not so great as the change from executing the Fugitive Slave Law 
in Boston to the Constitutional Emancipation of the slave in 
Maryland. Yet upon his death the Government reverted to the 
Stuarts. But upon the death of Abraham Lincoln, Freedom rears 
a monument, and for new conquests marches boldly into the future. 
I do see a Caesar yonder ; but his power is the purchase of fraud 
and crime, and falls about his grave like withered weeds. And 
away down yonder in the dark vortex of history, looking out upon 
the centuries, is old Pericles. But the thirty thousand citizens of 
Athens are lost in some inland town of America, with her thirty 
millions of citizens. There are many noble heroes who illumine 
the darkness behind us with the radiance of some single virtue ; 
but among them all I see no Lincoln. He is radiant with all the 
great virtues, and his memory shall shed a glory upon this ago 
that shall fill the eyes of men as they look into history. Other men 



684 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

have excelled him in some one point, hut, taken at all points, all 
and in all, he stands head and shoulders above every other man of 
six thousand years. An Administrator, he saved the nation in the 
perils of unparalleled civil war. A Statesman, he justified his 
measures by their success. A Philanthropist, he gave liberty to 
one race and salvation to another. A Moralist, he bowed from 
the summit of human power to the foot of the Cross, and became 
a Christian; A Mediator, he exercised mercy under the most 
absolute abeyance to law. A Leader, he was no partisan. A 
Commander, he was untainted with blood. A Ruler in desperate 
times, he was unsullied with crime. A Man, he has left no word 
of passion, no thought of malice, no trick of craft, no act of 
jealousy, no purpose of selfish ambition. Thus perfected, without 
a model and without a peer, he was dropped into these troubled 
years to adorn and embellish all that is good and all that is great 
in our humanity, and to present to all coming time the representa- 
tive of the divine idea of Free Government. 

It is not too much to say that away down in the future, when 
the Republic has fallen from its niche in the wall of time; when 
the great war itself shall have faded out in the distance like a mist 
on the horizon ; when the Anglo-Saxon language shall be handed 
only by the tongue of the stranger ; then the generations looking 
this way shall see the great President as the supreme figure in this 
vortex of History. 

As we to-day think that Athens is Greece because it was the 
home of Socrates and of Pericles, so in the future men shall think 
that Illinois is America, because it is the home of Lincoln and of 
Grant. 

Faulty, indeed, would be the view of Illinois that omitted suit- 
able reference to her learned professions, though no more than a 
reference can be made. The work of her Ministry is seen in the 
high moral tone of the people. By their fruits ye shall know 
them. From Pere Marquette to her living pulpit orators, her mi- 
nistry have always been an essential element in any estimate of 
her forces. 

The Bar of Illinois has been an honorable Bar from the begin- 
ning. Few States have equalled it. In many noble respects none 
have surpassed it. 



ORATION — CHARLES H. FOWLER, D.D., LL.D. 085 

Nor does the State suffer when we turn toward the Medical 
Profession. Need I mention Daniel Brainard, the surgeon whose 
knife pdayed like a thing of life ? or N. S. Davis, of the Chicago 
Medical College, creator of the American Medical Association, 
author of the long and graded courses for medical students ? We 
must not omit Volk, the sculptor who made the first bust west of 
the Alleghanies, and whose busts of Lincoln and Douglas are the 
standards for the present and models for the future. 

"We may not close this outline of the great State without turn- 
ing your attention to the great city at the head of the lakes. The 
subject itself is too vast for the brief moments that remains to this 
speech. 

Spur your horse for a half-day up the base of " The Cap of 
Liberty," in the Yosemite Valley ; stop at noon, worn and weary, 
on the borders where vegetation ceases ; stretch your arms up 
toward the bold, far-away summit, and then you will feel the im- 
possibility of compassing that bold old peak in one thought. In 
like manner set your thought upon the subject before us — this 
mysterious, majestic, mighty city, born first of water, and next of 
fire ; sown in weakness, and raised in power ; planted among the 
willows of the marsh, and crowned with the glory of the moun- 
tains ; sleeping on the bosom of the prairie, and rocked on the 
bosom of the sea ; the youngest city of the world, and still the eye 
of the prairie, as Damascus, the oldest city of the world, is the eye 
of the desert. With a commerce far exceeding that of Corinth on 
her isthmus, in the highway to the East ; with the defenses of a 
Continent piled around her by the thousand miles, making her far 
safer than Rome on the banks of the Tiber ; with schools eclipsing 
Alexandria and Athens ; with liberties more conspicuous than 
those of the old Republics ; with a heroism equal to the first Car- 
thage, and with a sanctity scarcely second to that of Jerusalem — 
set your thoughts on all this, lifted into the eyes of all men by the 
miracle of its growth, illuminated by the flame of its fall, and 
transfigured by the divinity of its resurrection, and you will feel, 
as I do, the utter impossibility of compassing this subject as it de- 
serves. Some impression of her importance is received from the 
shock her burning gave to the civilized world. 

When the doubt of her calamity was removed, and the horrid 



686 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

fact was accepted, there went a shudder over all cities, and a quiver 
over all lands. There was scarcely a town in the civilized world 
that did not shake on the brink of this opening chasm. The 
flames of our homes reddened all skies. The city was set upon a 
hill, and could not be hid. All eyes were turned upon it. To have 
struggled and suffered amid the scenes of its fall is as distinguish- 
ing as to have fought at Thermopylae, or Salamis, or Hastings, or 
Waterloo, or Bunker Hill. 

Its calamity amazed the world, because it was felt to be the 
common property of Mankind. 

The early history of the city is full of interest, just as the early 
history of such a man as Washington or Lincoln becomes public 
property, and is cherished by every patriot. 

Starting with 500 acres in 1833, it embraced and occupied 
23,000 acres in 1869, and, having now a population of more than 
500,000, it commands general attention. 

Colbert, of the Chicago Tribune, so highly honored by, and so 
honoring, our daily press — that strange compound of music and 
mathematics, of the sciences of the books and the items of a daily 
newspaper — develops the fact that the first white man that ever 
settled in Chicago was a negro. He opened trade with the In- 
dians in 1796, and consecrated this soil to the Fifteenth Amend- 
ment. But more than a hundred years before that, in 1673, 
Father Marquette spent some mouths here, on his way from the 
North to the Mississippi, and, laboring as a missionary among the 
Indians, consecrated this soil to Christianity. Old Fort Dearborn 
with its wall of piles, sharpened at the top, and its concealed dug- 
way to the river, and its officers' mansion of logs, was planted in 
1812. The first house was built by II. J. Kinzie in 1815. A 
mere trading-post was kept here from that time till about the time 
of the Blackhawk war, in 1832. It was not the city. It was 
merely a cock crowing at midnight. The morning was not yet. 
In 1833 the settlement about the Fort was incorporated as a town. 
The voters were divided on the propriety of such incorporation, 
twelve voting for it and one against it. Four years later it was 
incorporated as a city, and embraced five hundred and sixty acres. 

The produce handled in this city is an indication of its power. 
Grain and flour were imported from the East till as late as 1837j 



ORATION CHARLES II. FOWLER, D.D., LL.D. 687 

The first exportation by way of experiment was in 1839. Exports 
exceeded imports first in 1842. The Board of Trade was organ- 
ized in 1848, but it was so weak that it needed nursing till 1855. 
Grain was purchased by the wagon-load in the street. 

I remember sitting with my father on a load of wheat, in the 
long line of wagons along Lake street, while the buyers came and 
untied the bags, and examined the grain, and made their bids. 
That manner of business had to cease with the day of small things. 
Now our elevators will hold 15,000,000 bushels of grain. The 
cash value of the produce handled in a year is $215,000,000, and 
the produce weighs 7,000,000 tons or 700,000 car loads. This 
handles thirteen and a half tons each minute, all the year round. 
One tenth of all the wheat in the United States is handled in Chi- 
cago. Even as long ago as 1853 the receipts of grain in Chicago 
exceeded those of the goodly city of St. Louis, and in 1854 the 
exports of grain from Chicago exceeded those of New York and 
doubled those of St. Petersburg, Archangel, or Odessa, the largest 
grain markets in Europe. 

The manufacturing interests of the city are not contemptible. 
In 1873 manufactories employed 45,000 operatives; in 1876, 
60,000. The manufactured product in 1875 was worth $177,- 
000,000. 

No estimate of the size and power of Chicago would be ade- 
quate that did not put large emphasis on the railroads. Before 
they came thundering along our streets, canals were the hope of 
our country. But who ever thinks now of travelling by canal 
packets? In June, 1852, there were only forty miles of railroad 
connected with the city. The old Galena division of the North- 
western ran out to Elgin. But now, who can count the trains and 
measure the roads that seek a terminus or connection in this city ? 
The lake stretches away to the north, gathering in to this center 
all the harvests that might otherwise pass to the north of us. If 
you will take a map and look at the adjustment of railroads, you 
will see, first, that Chicago is the great railroad city of the world, 
as New York is the commercial city of this Continent, and, second, 
that the railroad lines form the iron spokes of a great wheel whose 
hub is this city. The lake furnishes the only break in the spokes, 
and this seems simply to have pushed a few spokes together on 



G88 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

each shore. All these roads have come themselves hy the infal- 
lible instincts of capital. Not a dollar was ever given by the city 
to secure one of them, and only a small per cent, of stock taken 
originally by her citizens, and that taken simply as an investment. 
Coming in the natural order of events, they will not be easily 
diverted. 

There is still another showing to all this. The connection 
between New York and San Francisco is by the middle route. 
This passes inevitably through Chicago. St. Louis wants the 
Southern Pacific or Kansas Pacific, and pushes it out through 
Denver, and so on to Cheyenne. But before the road is fairly 
under way, the Chicago road shoves out to Kansas City, making 
even the Kansas Pacific a feeder, and actually leaving St. Louis 
out in the cold. It is not too much to expect that Dakota, 
Montana, and Washington Territory, will find their great market 
in Chicago. 

But these are not all. Perhaps I had better notice here the ten 
or fifteen new roads that have just entered, or are just enter- 
ing, our city. Their names are all that is necessary to give. 
Chicago and St. Paul, looking up the Red River country to 
the British Possessions ; the Chicago, Atlantic and Pacific ; the 
Chicago, Decatur and State Line ; the Baltimore and Ohio ; 
the Chicago, Danville and Vincennes ; the Chicago and La Salle 
Railroad ; the Chicago, Pittsburg and Cincinnati ; the Chicago 
and Canada Southern; the Chicago and Illinois River Railroad. 
These, with their connections, and with the new connections of 
the old roads already in process of erection, give to Chicago 
not less than ten thousand miles of new tributaries from the richest 
land on the Continent. Thus there will be added to the reserve 
power, to the capital within the reach of this city, not less than 
$1,000,000,000. 

Add to all this transporting power the ships, that sail one every 
nine minutes of the business hours of the season of navigation ; 
add, also, the canal boats, that leave one every minute during 
the same time — and you will see something of the business of the 
city. 

The commerce of this city has been leaping along to keep pace 
with the growth of the country around us. In J852 our commerce 



ORATION — CHARLES H. FOWLER, D.D., LL.D. 689 

reached the hopeful sum of $20,000,000. In 1870 it reached 
$400,000,000. In 1871 it was pushing up above $450,000,000. 
And in 1875 it touched nearly double that. 

One half of our imported goods come directly to Chicago. 
Grain enough is exported directly from our docks to the Old 
World to employ a semi-weekly line of steamers of 3,000 tons 
capacity. This branch is not likely to be greatly developed. 
Even after the great Wei land Canal is completed, we shall have 
only fourteen feet of water. The great ocean vessels will con- 
tinue to control the trade. 

The banking capital of Chicago is $24,431,000. Total exchange 
in 1875, $659,000,000. Her wholesale business in 1875 was $294,- 
000,000. The rate of taxes is less than in any other great city. 

The schools of Chicago are unsurpassed in America. Out 
of a population of 300,000 there were only 186 persons between 
the ages of six and twenty-one unable to read. This is the 
best known record. 

In 1831 the mail system was condensed into a half-breed, who, 
went on foot to Niles, Mich., once in two weeks, and brought 
back what papers and news he could find. As late as 1848 there 
was often only one mail a week. A post-office was established in 
Chicago in 1833, and the postmaster nailed up old boot-legs on 
one side of his shop to serve as boxes for the nabobs and literary 
men. 

It is an interesting fact in the growth of the young city that 
in the active life of the business men of that day the mail matter 
has grown to a daily average of over 6,500 pounds. It speaks 
equally well for the intelligence of the people and the commercial 
importance of the place, that the mail matter distributed to 
the territory immediately tributary to Chicago is seven times 
greater than that distributed to the territory immediately tributary 
to St. Louis. The improvements that have characterized the city 
are as startling as the city itself. 

In 1831, Mark Beaubien established a ferry over the river, and 
put himself under bonds to carry all the citizens free for the 
privilege of charging strangers. Now there are twenty-four large 
bridges and two tunnels. 

In 1833 the Government expended $30,000 on the harbor. 



690 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Then commenced that series of manoeuvers with the river that has 
made it one of the world's curiosities. It used to wind around in 
the lower end of the town, and make its way rippling over 
the sand into the lake at the foot of Madison-street. They took 
it up and put it down where it now is. It was a narrow stream, 
so narrow that even moderately small crafts had to go up through 
the willows and cat's tails to the point near Lake-street bridge, 
and back up one of the branches to get room enough in which 
to turn round. 

In 1844 the quagmires in the streets were first pontooned by 
plank roads, which acted in wet weather as public squirt-guns. 
Keeping you out of the mud, they compromised by squirting the 
mud over you. The wooden block j>avements came to Chicago 
in 1857. In 1840 water was delivered by peddlers in carts, or by 
hand. Then a twenty-five horse-power engine pushed it through hoi 
low or bored logs along the streets till 1854, when it was intro 
duced into the houses by new work. The first fire-engine was 
used in 1835, and the first steam fire-engine in 1859. Gas was 
utilized for lighting the city in 1850. The Young Men's Christian 
Association was organized in 1858, and horse railroads carried them 
to their work in 1859. The museum was opened in 1863. The 
alarm telegraph adopted in 18G4. The Opera House built in 1865. 
The city grew from 560 acres in 1833 to 23,000 in 1869. In 
1834 the taxes amounted to $48.90, and the trustees of the town 
borrowed sixty dollars more for opening and improving streets. 
In 1835 the Legislature authorized a loan of $2,000, and the 
Treasurer and Street Commissioners resigned rather than plunge 
the town into such a gulf. 

Now the city embraces thirty-six square miles of territory, and 
has thirty miles of water front, besides the outside Harbor of 
Refuge, of 400 acres, inclosed by a crib sea-wall. One third of 
the city has been raised up an average of eight feet, giving good 
j>itch to the 203 miles of sewerage. The water of the city is above 
all competition. It is received through two tunnels extending to 
a crib in the lake two miles from shore. The closest analysis 
fails to detect any impurities, and, received thirty-five feet below 
the surface, it is always clear and cold. The first tunnel was five 
feet two inches in diameter and two miles long, and can deliver 



ORATION — CHARLES II. FOWLER, OI)., LL.D. G91 

50,000,000 of gallons per clay. The second tunnel is seven feet 
in diameter, and six miles long, running four miles under the city, 
andean deliver 100,000,000 of gallons per day. This water is dis- 
tributed through 1 10 miles of water mains. 

The three grand engineering exploits of the city are : First, 
lifting the city up on jack-screws, whole squares at a time, without 
interrupting the business, thus giving us good drainage; second, 
running the tunnels under the lake, giving us the best water in 
the world; and, third, the turning the current of the river in its 
own channel, delivering us from the old abominations, and making 
decency possible. They redounded about equally to the credit 
of the engineering, to the energy of the people, and to the health 
of the city. 

That which really constitutes the city, its indescribable spirit, 
its soul, the way it lights up in every feature in the hour of action, 
has not been touched. In meeting strangers, one is often surprised 
how some homely women marry so well. Their forms are bad, 
their gait uneven and awkward, their complexion is dull, their fea- 
tures misshapen and mismatched, and when we see them there is no 
beauty that we should desire them. But when once they are 
aroused on some subject, they put on new proportions. They light 
up into great power The real person comes out from its un- 
seemly ambush, and captures us at will. They have power. They 
have ability to cause things to come to pass. We no longer wonder 
why they are in such high demand. So it is with our city. To 
the stranger it seems flat, and cheap, wooden. There is plenty of 
wind, and no lack of dust, and a full supply of mud. There is no 
grand scenery except the two seas, one of water, the other of 
prairie. Nevertheless, there is a spirit about it, a push, a breath, 
a power, that soon makes it a place never to be forsaken. One 
soon ceases to believe in impossibilities. Balsams are the only 
prophets that are disappointed. The bottom that has been in the 
point of falling out has been there so long that it has grown fast. 
It cannot fall out. It has all the capital of the world itching to 
get inside the corporation. As when you kill a Chicago rat a 
hundred more will come to the funeral, so when one man falls or 
is crushed, a hundred large ones leap for his place. 

When we turn our gaze towards the future — and turn it we 



Hf)2 OUU NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

must, for we are all prophets, and the sons of prophets — -from ques- 
tioning that which is to come, we are startled with the develop- 
ments that are insured hy the inevitable march of events. 

May I tell you what I see, and he allowed to depart in peace ? 
I must tell you. This is the purpose for which I am here. In the 
language of an old hero, I say, " Strike, but hear!" 

I see Chicago in the future as the greatest city in the world. 
It is in league with events, and must grow to this measure. It ist 
inland, jjrotected from all foreign foes. It is on the productive 
belt of the temperate zone, where thrive all the aggressive civili- 
zations. It is near the center of the Continent, and the center of 
the great valley that could support a thousand million people ; and 
it commands more territory than any ten great cities of the world 
combined. The two great laws that govern the growth and size 
of cities are, first, the amount of territory for which they are the 
distributing and receiving points ; second, the number of medium 
or moderate dealers that do this distributing. Monopolists build 
up themselves, not the cities. They neither eat, wear, nor live in 
proportion to their business. Both these laws help Chicago. 

The tide of trade is eastward — not up or down the map, but 
across the map. The lake runs up a wing dam for five hundred 
miles to gather in the business. Commerce cannot ferry up there 
for seven months in the year, and the facilities for seven months 
can do the work for twelve. Then the great region west of us is 
nearly all good, productive land. Dropping south into the trail of 
St. Louis, you fall into vast deserts and rocky districts, useful in 
holding the world together. St. Louis and Cincinnati, instead of 
rivaling and hurting Chicago, are her greatest sureties of dominion. 
They are far enough away to give sea-room — farther off than Paris 
is from London — and yet they are near enough to prevent the 
springing up of any other great city between them. 

St. Louis will be helped by the opening of the Mississippi, but 
also hurt. That will put New Orleans on her feet, and with a 
railroad running over into Texas, and so west, she will tap the 
streams that now crawl up the Texas and Missouri road. The 
current is east, not north, and a sea-port at New Orleans cannot 
permanently help St. Louis. 

Chicago is in the field almost alone, to handle the wealth of one- 



ORATION — CHARLES H. FOWLER, D.D., LL.D. C93 

fourth of the territory of this great Republic. This strip of sea- 
coast divides its margins between Portland, Boston, New York, 
Philadelphia, Baltimore and Savannah, or some other great port 
to be created for the South in the next decade. But Chicago has 
a dozen empires casting their treasures into her lap. On a bed of 
coal that can run all -the machinery of the world for five hundred 
centuries ; in a garden that can feed the race by the thousand 
years ; at the head of the lakes that give her a temperature as a 
summer resort equalled by no great city in the*land ; with a climate 
that insures the health of her citizens; surrounded by all the great 
deposits of natural wealth in mines and forests and herds, Chicago 
is the wonder of the day, and will be The City of the future. 

Fellow-citizens of Illinois, and fellow-citizens of the Republic, 
I am unable to eulogize the Prairie State. I have simply recited 
some of the facts with which her history abounds. I can do no 
more. There she stands, to speak for herself. Her soil, her 
mines, her herds, her improvements, her schools, her churches, her 
intelligence, her liberties, her learned professions, her war record, 
her heroes, her martyrs, her Presidents, and her great city — these 
are her glory, and shall be, so long as the nation endures. While 
I look into the future, the ages are rolled together ; the Common- 
wealth of Illinois puts on purple and fine linen, and Europe and 
Asia, coming from the East and from the "West, find their exchange 
in her great marts. Brothers, it remains for us to complete the 
marvellous record by making Illinois as good as Providence will 
make her great. Then she will be both the garden of the world 
and the garden of the Lord. 



THE MEANING OF THE DECLAKATION. 

AN ORATION BY" COL. ROBERT G. INGERSOLL, 

I 

DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION AT 1'EOlilA, 
ILLINOIS, JULY 4, 1876. 

Fellow-citizens. — You have just heard read the grandest 
the bravest, and the profoundest political document that was ever 
signed by man. It is the embodiment of physical and moral cour- 
age and of political wisdom. I say of physical courage, because it 
was a declaration of war against the most powerful nation then on 
the globe ; a declaration of war by thirteen weak, unorganized 
colonies ; a declaration of war by a few people, without military 
stores, without wealth, without strength, against the most powerful 
kingdom on the earth; a declaration of war made, when the 
British navy, at that day the mistress of every sea, was hovering 
along the coast of America, looking after defenceless towns and 
villages to ravage and destroy. It was made when thousands of 
English soldiers were upon our soil, and when the principal cities 
of America were in the possession of the enemy. And so, I say, 
all things considered, it was the bravest political document ever 
signed by man. And if it was physically brave, the moral com age 
of the document is almost infinitely beyond the physical. They 
had the courage not only, but they had the almost infinite wisdom 
to declare that all men are created equal. Such things had 
occasionally been said by some political enthusiasts in the olden 
time, but for the first time in the history of the world, the repre- 
sentatives of a nation, the representatives of a real living, breath- 
ing, hoping people, declared that all men are created equal. With 
one blow, with one stroke of the pen, they struck down all the 
cruel, heartless barriers that aristocracy, that priestcraft, that king- 
craft had raised between man and man. They struck down with 
one immortal blow, that infamous spirit of caste that makes a god 



ORATION — COI.. ROBERT G. ENGERSOLL. 695 

almost a beast,, and a beast almost a god. With one word, with 
one blow, they wiped away and utterly destroyed all that had been 
done by centuries of war — centuries of hypocrisy — ceniuries of 
injustice. 

What more did they do ? They then declared that each man 
has a right to live And what does that mean? It means that 
lie has the right to make his living. It means that he has the 
right to breathe the air, to work the land, that he stands the equal 
of every other human being beneath the shining stars ; entitled to 
the product of his labor — the labor of his hand and of his brain. 

What more ? That every man has the right to pursue his own 
happiness in his own way. Grander words than these have never 
been spoken by man. 

And what more did these men say ? They laid down the doc- 
trine, that governments were instituted among men for the purpose 
of preserving the rights of the people. The old idea was that 
people existed solely for the benefit of the state — that is to say, 
tor kings and nobles. 

And what more ? That the people are the source of political 
power. That was not only a revelation, but it was a revolution. 
It changed the ideas of the people with regard to the source of 
political jxnver. For the first time it made human beings men. 
What was the old idea ? The old idea was that no political power 
came from, nor in any manner belonged to, the people. The old 
idea was that the political power came from the clouds ; that the 
political power came in some miraculous way from heaven ; that it 
came down to kings, and queens, and robbers. That was the old 
idea. The nobles lived upon the labor of the people ; the people 
had no rights ; the nobles stole what they had and divided with the 
kings, and the kings pretended to divide what they stole with Cod 
Almighty. The source, then, of political power was from above. 
The people were responsible to the nobles, the nobles to the kings, 
and the people had no political rights whatever, no more than the 
wild beasts of the forest. The kings were responsible to God : 
not to the people. The kings were responsible to the clouds; not 
to the toiling millions they robbed and plundered. 

And our forefathers, in this declaration of independence, reversed 
this thing, and said, No ; the people, they are the source of politi- 



696 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

cal power, and their rulers, these presidents, these kings, are hut 
the agents and servants of the great, sublime people. For the 
lirst time, really, in the history of the world, the king was made to 
get off the throne and the people were loyally .seated thereon. 
The peojde beeame the sovereigns, and the old sovereigns became 
the servants and the agents of the people. It is hard for you and 
me now to imagine even the immense results of that change. It 
is hard for you and for me at this day to understand how thor- 
oughly it had been ingrained in the brain of almost every man, 
that the king had some wonderful right over him ; that in some 
strange way the king owned him ; that in some miraculous manner 
he belonged, body and soul, to somebody who rode on a horse, 
with epaulettes on his shoulders and a tinsel crown upon his brain- 
less head. 

Our forefathers had been educated in that idea, and when they 
first landed on American shores they believed it. They thought 
they belonged to somebody, and that they must be loyal to some 
thief, who could trace his pedigree back to antiquity's most suc- 
cessful robber. 

It took a long time for them to get that idea out of their heads 
and hearts. They were three thousand miles away from the des- 
potisms of the old world, and every wave of the sea was an assist- 
ant to them. The distance helped to disenchant their minds of 
that infamous belief, and every mile between them and the pomp 
and glory of monarchy helped to put republican ideas and thoughts 
into their minds. Besides that, when they came to this country, 
when the savage was in the forest and three thousand miles of 
waves on the other side, menaced by barbarians on the one side 
and by famine on the other, they learned that a man who had 
courage, a man who had thought, was as good as any other man in 
the world, and they built up, as it were, in spite of themselves, lit- 
tle republics. And the man that had the most nerve and heart 
was the best man, whether he had any noble blood in his veins or 
not. 

It has been a favorite idea with me that our forefathers were 
educated by Nature ; that they grew grand as the continent upon 
which they landed; that the great rivers — tin' wide plains — the 
splendid lakes — the lonely forests — the sublime mountains — that 



ORATION — COL. ROBERT G. INGERSOLL. G97 

all these things stole into and became a part of their being, and 
they grew great as the country in which they lived. They began 
to hate the narrow, contracted views of Europe. They were edu- 
cated by their surroundings, and every little colony had to be, to 
a certain extent, a republic. The kings of the old world endeav- 
ored to parcel out this land to their favorites. But there were too 
many Indians. There was too much courage required for them to 
take and keep it, and so men had to come here who were dissatis- 
fied with the old country, who were dissatisfied with England, 
with France, with Germany, with Ireland and Holland. The 
kings' favorites stayed at home. Men came here for liberty, and 
on account of certain principles they entertained and held dearer 
than life. And they were willing to work, willing to fell the 
forests, to fight the savages, willing to go through all the hardships, 
perils and dangers of a new country, of a new land, and the conse- 
quence was that our country was settled by brave and adventurous 
spirits ; by men who had opinions of their own and were willing to 
live in the wild forest for the sake of expressing those opinions, 
even if they expressed them only to trees, rocks, and savage men. 
The best blood of the old world came to the new. 

When they first came over they did not have a great deal of 
political philosophy, not the best ideas of liberty. We might as 
well tell the truth. When the Puritans first came, they were nar- 
row. They did not understand what liberty meant — what relig- 
ious liberty, what political liberty, was ; but they found out in a 
few years. There was one feeling among them that rises to their 
eternal honor like a white shaft to the clouds — they were in favor 
of universal education. Wherever they went they built school 
houses, introduced books, and ideas of literature. They believed 
that every man should know how to read and how to write, and 
should find out all that his capacity allowed him to comprehend. 
That is the glory of the Puritan fathers. 

They forgot in a little while what they had suffered, and they 
forgot to apply the principal of universal liberty — of toleration. 
Some of the colonies did not forget it, and I want to give credit 
where credit should be given. The catholics of Maryland 
were the first* people on the new continent to declare univer- 
sal religious toleration. Let this be remembered to their eternal 



698 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

honor. Let this be remembered to the disgrace of the Protestant 
government of England, that it caused this grand law to be re- 
pealed. And to the honor and credit of the catholics of Maryland 
let it be remembered that the moment they got back into power 
they re-enacted the old law. The Baptists of Rhode Island also, led 
by Roger Williams, were in favor of universal religious liberty. 
And these were the only colonies that were in favor of religious 
freedom. Yet it may truthfully be said that they did not under- 
stand the idea of religious liberty as we understand it, to-day. 

But the people finally met in (•(digress in the old city of Phila- 
delphia. They had become tired of being colonists — of writing 
and reading and signing petitions, and presenting them on their 
bended knees, to an idiot king. They began to have an aspiration 
to form a new nation, to be citizens of a new republic instead of 
subjects of an old monarchy. They had the idea — the Puritans, 
the Catholics, the Episcopalians, the Baptists, the Quakers, and a 
few Free Thinkers, all had the idea — that they would like to form 
a new nation. 

Now, do not understand that all of our fathers were in favor of 
independence. Do not understand that they were all like Jeffer- 
son ; that they were all like Adams or Lee ; that they were all 
like Thomas Paine or John Hancock. There were thousands and 
thousands of them who were opposed to American independence. 
There were thousands and thousands who said, "When you say 
men are created equal, it is a lie ; when you say the political power 
resides in the great body of the people, it is false." Thousands 
and thousands of them said, " We prefer Great Britain." But the 
men who were in favor of independence, the men who knew that 
a new nation must be born, went on in full hope and courage, and 
nothing could daunt or stop or stay these heroic, fearless men. 

They met in Philadelphia; and the resolution was moved by 
Lee of Virginia, that the colonies ought to be independent stales, 
and ought to dissolve their political connection with Great Britain. 

They made up their minds that a new nation must be formed. 
All nations had been, so to speak, the wards of some church. The 
religious idea as to the source of power had been at the foundation 
of all governments, and had been the bane and curse of man. 

Happily for us, there was no church strong enough to dictate to 



ORATION — COL. ROBERT G. INGERSOLL. 00',) 

the rest. Fortunately for us, the colonists not only, but the colo- 
nies differed widely in their religious views. There were the 
Puritans who hated the Episcopalians, and Episcopalians who 
hated the Catholics, and the Catholics who hated both, while the 
Quakers held them all in contempt. There they were, of every 
sort, and color, and kind, and how was it that they came together? 
They had a common aspiration. They wanted to form a new 
nation. More than that, most of them cordially hated Great 
Britain; and they pledged each other to forget these religious 
prejudices, for a time at least, and agreed that there should be only 
one religion until they got through, and that was the religion of 
patriotism. They solemnly agreed that the new nation should not 
belong to any particular church, but that it should secure the rights 
of all. 

Our fathers founded the first secular government that was ever 
founded in this world. Recollect that. The first secular govern- 
ment ; the first government that said every church has exactly the 
same rights, and no more; every religion has the same rights, and 
no more. In other words, our fathers were the first men who had 
the sense, had the genius, to know that no church should be al- 
lowed to have a sword ; that it should be allowed only to exert its 
moral influence. You might as well have a state united by force 
with art or with property, or with oratory, as with religion. 
Religion should have the influence upon mankind that its goodness, 
that its morality, its justice, its charity, its reason, and its argu- 
ment give it, and no more. Religion should have the effect 14)011 
mankind that it necessarily has, and no more. The religion that 
has to be supported by law is without value, not only, but a fraud 
and curse. The argument that has to be supported by a musket, 
is no argument. A prayer that must have a cannon behind it, 
had better never be uttered. 

So, our fathers said, " We will form a secular goverrnent, and 
under the flag with which we are going to enrich the air we will 
allow every man to worship God as he thinks best. They said, 
" Religion is an individual thing between each man and his 
Creator, and he can worship as he pleases and as he desires." 
And why did they do this ? The history of the world warned 
them that the liberty of man was not safe iu the clutch and grasp 



700 OUU NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

of any church. They had read of and seen the thumb-screws, the 
racks and the dungeons of the inquisition. They knew all about 
the hypocrisy of the olden time. They knew that the church had 
stood side by side with the throne ; that the high priests were 
hypocrites, and that kings were robbers. They also knew that if 
they gave to any church power, that power would corrupt the best 
church in the world. And so they said, power must not reside 
in a church or in a sect, in a few or in a nobility, but power must 
lie wherever humanity is, in the great body of the people ; and the 
officers and servants of the people must be responsible to them 
And so I say again, as I said in the commencement, this is 
the wisest, the profoundest, the bravest political document that 
ever was written and signed by man. They turned, as I tell you, 
everything squarely about. They derived all their authority from 
the people. They did away forever with the theological idea of 
government. 

And what more did they say ? They said that whenever the 
rulers abused this authority, this power, incapable of destruction, 
returned to the people. How did they come to say this ? I will 
tell you. They were pushed into it. How ? They felt that they 
were oppressed ; and whenever a man feels that he is the subject 
of injustice, his perception of right and wrong is wonderfully 
quickened. Nobody was ever in prison wrongfully who did not 
believe in the writ of habeas corpus. Nobody ever suffered 
wrongfully without instantly having ideas of justice. 

And they began to inquire what rights the king of Great 
Britain had. They began to search for the charter of his authority. 
They began to investigate and dig down to the bed rock upon 
which society must be founded, and when they got down 
there, forced thereto by their oppressors, forced against their 
own prejudices and education, they found at the bottom 
of things, not lords, not nobles, not pulpits, not thrones, 
but humanity and the rights of men. And so they said 
we are men ; we are men. They found out they were men. And 
the next thing they said, was, " we will be free men ; we have got 
weary of being colonists ; we are tired of being subjects; we are 
men ; and these colonies ought to be states ; and these states 
ought to be a nation ; and that nation ought to drive the last 



OllATION — COL. ROr.EltT G. INGKRSOLL. 701 

British soldier into the sea. And so they signed that hrave 
Declaration of Independence. 

I thank every one of them from the bottom of my heart for 
signing that sublime declaration. I thank them for their courage 
— for their patriotism —for their wisdom — for the splendid con- 
fidence in themselves and in the human race. I thank them for 
what they were, and for what we are — for what they did and, for 
what we have received — for what they suffered, and for what 
we enjoy. 

What would we have been if we had remained colonists and 
subjects? What would we have been to-day? Nobodies, — ready 
to get down on our knees and crawl in the very dust at the sight 
of somebody that was supposed to have in him some drop 
of blood that flowed in the veins of that mailed marauder — 
that royal robber, William the Conqueror. 

They signed that Declaration of Independence, although they 
knew that it would produce a long, terrible, and bloody war. 
They looked forward and saw poverty, deprivation, gloom, and 
death. But they also saw on the wrecked clouds of war, the 
beautiful bow of freedom. These grand men were enthusiasts ; 
and the world has only been raised by enthusiasts. In every 
country there have been a few enthusiasts who have always given 
a national aspiration to the people. The enthusiasts of 1776 were 
the builders and framers of this great and splendid government ; 
and the enthusiasts there saw, although others did not, the golden 
fringe of the mantle of glory that will finally cover this world. 
They knew it and they felt it ; and they said, notwithstanding the 
horrors of war, notwithstanding the privations of war, we will 
give a new constellation to the political heavens ; we will make the 
Americans a grand people, — grand as the continent upon which 
they live. 

The war commenced. There was no money, no credit. The 
new nation had no means and but few friends. To a great extent 
each soldier of freedom had to clothe and feed himself. 

What did the soldier leave when he went ? He left his wife and 
and children. Did he leave them in a beautiful home, surrounded 
by civilization, in the security of a great and powerful republic ? 
No. He left his wife and children on the edge, on the fringe 



702 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

of the boundless forest, in which crouched and crept the red 
savage, who was at that time the ally of the still more savage 
Briton. He left his wife to defend herself, and he left the 
prattling babes to be defended by their mother and by nature. 
The mother made the living ; she planted the corn and the 
potatoes, and hoed them in the sun, raised the children, and in the 
darkness of night, told them upon what a sacred expedition their 
brave father had gone. 

The soldiers of 177G did not march away with music and 
banners. They went in silence, looked at and gazed after by eyes 
filled with tears. They went not to meet an equal, but a superior 
— to fight five times their number — to make a desperate stand — to 
stop the advance of the enemy, and then, when their ammunition 
gave out, seek the protection of rocks, of rivers and of hills. 

Let me say here : The greatest test of courage on the earth 
is to bear defeat without losing heart. That army is the bravest, 
that can be whipped the greatest number of times and fight again. 

Over the entire territory, so to speak, then settled by our 
forefathers, they were driven again and again. Now and then 
they would meet the English with something like equal numbers, 
and then the eagle of victory would proudly perch upon the stripes 
and stars. And so they went on as best they could, hoping and 
fighting until they came to the dark and somber gloom of Valley 
Forge. There were very few hearts then beneath that flag that did 
not begin to think that the struggle was useless ; that all the 
blood and treasure had been spent in vain. But there were some 
men gifted with that wonderful prophecy that fulfils itself, and 
with that wonderful magnetic power that makes heroes of every- 
body they come in contact with. 

And so our fathers went through the gloom of that terrible 
time, and still fought on. Brave men wrote grand words, cheering 
the despondent, brave men did brave deeds, the rich man gave his 
wealth, the poor man gave his life, until at last, by the victory at 
Yorktown, the old banner won its jilace in the air, and became 
glorious forever. 

Seven long years of war— fighting for what? For the principle 
that all men are created equal — a truth that nobody ever disputed 
except a scoundrel ; nobody, nobody in the entire history of this 



ORATION — COL. ROBERT G. INGEllSOLL. 703 

world. No man ever denied that truth who was not a rascal, and 
at heart a thief, never, never, and never will. What else wei'e 
they fighting for ? Simply that in America every man should 
have a right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Nobody 
ever denied that except a villain ; never, never. It has been denied 
by kings — they were thieves. It has been denied by statesmen — • 
they were liars. It has been denied by priests, by clergymen, by 
cardinals, by bishops and by popes — they were hypocrites. 

What else were they fighting for ? For the idea that all polit- 
ical power is vested in the great body of the people. The great 
body of the people make all the money ; do all the work. They 
plow the land, cut down the forests ; they produce everything that 
is produced. Then who shall say what shall be done with what is 
produced except the producer ? Is it the non-producing thief, sit- 
ting on a throne, surrounded by vermin ? 

Those were the things they were fighting for ; and that is all 
they were fighting for. They fought to build up a new, a great 
nation; to establish an asylum for the oppressed of the world 
everywhere. They knew the history of this world. They knew 
the history of human slavery. 

The history of civilization is the history of the slow and painful 
enfranchisement of the human race. In the olden times the fam- 
ily was a monarchy, the father being the monarch. The mother 
and children were the veriest slaves. The will of the father was 
the supreme law. lie had the power of life and death. It took 
thousands of years to civilize this father, thousands of years to 
make the condition of wife and mother and child even tolerable. 
A few families constituted a tribe ; the tribe had a chief ; the chief 
was a tyrant ; a few tribes formed a nation ; the nation was gov- 
erned by a king, who was also a tyrant. A strong nation robbed, 
plundered, and took captive the weaker ones. This was the com- 
mencement of human slavery. 

It is not possible for the human imagination to conceive of the 
horrors of slavery. It has left no possible crime uncommitted, no 
possible cruelty un perpetrated. It has been practised and defended 
by all nations in some form. It has been upheld by all religions. 
It has been defended by nearly every pulpit. From the profits 
derived from the slave trade churches have been built, cathedrals 



704 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

reared and priests paid. Slavery lias been blessed by bishop, by 
cardinal and by pope. It has received the sanction of statesmen, 
of kings and of queens. It has been defended by the throne, the 
pulpit and the bench. Monarchs have shared in the profits. Cler- 
gymen have taken their part of the spoil, reciting passage of scrip- 
ture in its defense at the same time, and judges have taken their 
portion in the name of equity and law. 

Only a few years ago our ancestors were slaves. Only a few 
years ago they passed with and belonged to the soil, like coal un- 
der it and rocks on it. Only a few years ago they were treated 
like beasts of burden, worse far than we treat our animals at the 
present day. Only a few years ago it was a crime in England for 
a man to have a Bible in his house, a crime for which men were 
hanged, and their bodies afterwards burned. Only a few years 
ago fathers could and did sell their children. Only a few years 
ago our ancestors were not allowed to speak or write their thoughts 
that being a crime. Only a few years ago to be honest, at least in 
the expression of your ideas, was a felony. To do right was a 
capital offense ; and in those days chains and whips were the in- 
centives to labor, and the preventives of thought. Honesty was a 
vagrant, justice a fugitive, and liberty in chains. 

As soon as our ancestors began to get free, they began to en- 
slave others. "With an inconsistency that defies explanation, they 
practised upon others the same outrages that had been perpetrated 
upon them. As soon as white slavery began to be abolished, black 
slavery commenced. In this infamous ti-affic nearly every nation of 
Europe embarked. Fortunes were quickly realized ; the avarice 
and cupidity of Europe were excited ; all ideas of justice were dis- 
carded ; pity fled from the human breast ; a few good, brave men 
recited the horrors of the trade ; avarice was deaf ; religion refused 
to hear ; the trade went on ; the governments of Europe upheld it in 
the name of commerce — in the name of civilization and of religion. 
Our fathers knew the history of caste. They knew that in the 
despotisms of the old world it was a disgrace to be useful. They 
knew that a mechanic was esteemed as hardly the equal of a hound, 
and far below a blooded horse. They knew that a nobleman held 
a son of labor in contempt — that he had no rights the royal loafers 
were bound to respect. The world has changed. 



ORATION COL. ROUKRT G. [NGERSOLL. 705 

The other day there came shoemakers, potters, workers in wood 
and iron from France, and they were received in the city of New 
York as though they had been princes. They had been sent by 
the great republic of France to examine into the arts and manu- 
factures of the great republic of America. They looked a thou- 
sand times better to me than the Edward Alberts and Albert Ed- 
wards — the royal vermin, that live on the body politic. And I 
would think much more of our government if it would fete and 
feast them, instead of wining and dining the miserable imbeciles of 
a rotten royal line. 

Our fathers devoted their lives and fortunes to the grand work 
of founding a government for the protection of the rights of man. 
The theological idea as to the source of political power had poi- 
soned the web and woof of every government in the world, and 
our fathers banished it from this continent forever. 

What we want to-day is what our fathers wrote down. They 
did not attain to their ideal ; we approach it nearer, but have 
not reached it yet. We want, not only the independence of a 
State, not only the independence of a nation, but something far 
more glorious — the absolute independence of the individual. That 
is what we want. I want it so that I, one of the children of Na- 
ture, can stand on an equality with the rest ; that T can say this is 
my air, my sunshine, my earth, and that I have a right to live, and 
hope, and aspire, and labor, and enjoy the fruit of that labor, as 
much as any individual or any nation on the face of the globe. 

We want every American to make to-day, on this hundredth 
anniversary, a declaration of individual independence. Let each 
man enjoy his liberty to the utmost — enjoy all lie can ; but be sure 
it is not at the expense of another. The French convention gave 
the best definition of liberty T have ever read: "The liberty of one 
citizen ceases only where the liberty of another citizen commences." 
I know of no better definition. I ask you to-day to make a declara- 
tion of individual independence. And if you are independent, be 
just. Allow everybody else to make his declaration of individual 
independence. Allow your wife, allow r your husband, allow your 
children to make theirs. Let everybody be absolutely free and 
independent, knowing only the sacred obligation of honesty and 
affection. Let us be independent of party, independent of every- 

45 ' 



70G OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

body and everything except onr own consciences and our own 
brains. Do not belong to any clique. Have the clear title deeds 
in fee simple to yourselves, without any mortgage on the premises 
to anybody in the world. 

Only a few days ago I stood in Independence Hall — in that little 
room where was signed the immortal paper. A little room, like 
any other ; and it did not seem possible that from that room went 
forth ideas, like cherubim and seraphim, spreading their wings over 
a continent, and touching, as with holy fire, the hearts of men. 

In a few moments I was in the park, where are gathered the 
accomplishments of a century. Our fathers never dreamed of the 
things I saw. There were hundreds of locomotives, with their 
nerves of steel and breath of flame — every kind of machine, with 
whirling wheels and curious cogs and cranks, and the myriad 
thoughts of men that have been wrought in iron, brass, and steel. 
And going out from one little building were wires in the air, stretch- 
ing to every civilized nation, and they could send a shining mes- 
senger in a moment to any part of the world, and it would go 
sweeping under the waves of the sea with thoughts and words 
within its glowing heart. I saw all that had been achieved by this 
nation, and I wished that the signers of the Declaration — the sol- 
diers of the revolution — could see what a century of freedom has 
produced. That they could see the fields we cultivate — the rivers 
we navigate — the railroads running over the Alleganies,, far into 
what was then the unknown forest — on over the broad prairies — 
on over the vast plains — away over the mountains of the West, to 
the Golden Gate of the Pacific. 

All this is the result of a hundred years of freedom. 

Are you not more than glad that in 177G was announced the 
sublime princijile that political power resides with the people? 
That our fathers then made up their minds nevermore to be colo- 
nists and subjects, but that they would be free and independent 
citizens of America ? 

I will not name any of the grand men who fought for liberty. 
All should be named, or none. I feel that the unknown soldier who 
was shot down without even his name being remembered — who was 
included only in a report of "a hundred killed," or " a hundred 
missing," nobody knowing even the number that attached to his 



ORATION — COL. ROBERT G. INGERSOLL. 7U7 

august corpse — is entitled to as deep and heartfelt thanks as the 
titled leader who fell at the head of the host. 

Standing here amid the sacred memories of the first, on the gol- 
den threshold of the second, I ask : Will the second century be as 
grand as the first ? I believe it will, because we are growing 
more and more humane. I believe there is more human kindness, 
more real, sweet human sympathy, a greater desire to help one ano- 
ther, in the United States, than in all the world besides. 

We must progress. We are just at the commencement of inven- 
tion. The steam engine — the telegraph — these are but the Toys 
with which science has been amused. Wait ; there will be grander 
things; there will be wider and higher culture — a grander stand- 
ard of character, of literature, anil art. 

We have now half as many millions of people as we have years, 
and many of us will live until a hundred million stand beneath the 
flag. We are getting more real soiid sense. The school-house is 
the finest building in the village. We are writing and reading 
more books, we are painting and buying more pictures ; we are 
struggling more and more to get at the philosophy of life, of things 
■ — trying more and more to answer the questions of the eternal 
sphinx ; we are looking in every direction — investigating ; in short, 
we are thinking and working. Besides all this, 1 believe the people 
are nearer honest than ever before. A few years ago we were 
willing to live upon the labor of four million slaves. Was that 
honest? At last, we have a national conscience. At last, we have 
carried out the Declaration of Independence. Our fathers wrote 
it — we have accomplished it. The black man was a slave — we 
made him a citizen. We found four million human beings in 
manacles, and now the hands of a rare are held up in the free air, 
to-day, without a chain. 

I have had the supreme pleasure of seeing a man — once a slave 
— sitting in the seat of his former master in the Congress of the 
United States. I have had that pleasure, and when I saw it, my 
eyes were filled with tears. I felt that we had carried out the 
Declaration of Independence, — that we had given reality to it, and 
breathed the breath of life into its every word. 1 felt that our 
flag would float over and protect the colored man and his little. 
children — standing straight in the sun. just the same as though he 



708 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

were white and worth a million. I would protect him more, be- 
cause the rich white man can protect himself. 

All who stand beneath our flag are free. Ours is the only flag 
that has in reality written upon it : Liberty, Fraternity, Equality 
— the three grandest words in all the languages of men. 

Liberty : Give to every man the fruit of his own labor — the 
labor of his hands and of his brain. 

Fraternity : Every man in the right is my brother. 

Equality : The rights of all are equal : Justice, poised and 
balanced in eternal calm, will shake from the golden scales, in 
which are weighed the acts of men, the very dust of prejudice and 
caste : No race, no color, no previous condition, can change the 
rights of men. 

The Declaration of Independence has been carried out in letter 
and in spirit. 

The second century will be grander than the first. 

Fifty millions of people are celebrating this day. To-day, the 
black man looks upon his child and says : The avenues to dis- 
tinction are open to you — upon your brow may fall the civic 
wreath — this day belongs to you. 

We are celebrating the courage and wisdom of our fathers, and 
the glad shout of a free people, the anthem of a grand nation, com- 
mencing at the Atlantic, is following the sun to the Pacific, across 
a continent of happy homes. 

We are a great people. Three millions have increased to fifty 
— thirteen States to thirty-eight. We have better homes, better 
clothes, better food and more of it, and more of the conveniences 
of life, than any other people upon the globe. 

The farmers of Peoria county live better than did the kings and 
princes two hundred years ago — and they have twice as much 
sense and heart. Liberty and labor have given us all. I want 
every person here to believe in the dignity of labor — to know that 
the respectable man is the useful man — the man who produces or 
helps others to produce something of value, whether thought of 
the brain or work of the hand. 

I want you to go away with an eternal hatred in your breast of 
injustice, of aristocracy, of caste, of the idea that one man has mora 
rights than another because he has better clothes, more land, mora 



ORATION — COL. ROBERT G. INGERSOLL. 709 

money, because he owns a railroad, or is famous and in high posi- 
tion. I Remember that all men have equal rights. Remember that 
the man who acts best his part — who loves his friends the best — 
is most willing to help others — truest to the discharge of obligation 
— who has the best heart — the most feeling — the deepest sympa- 
thies — and who freely gives to others the rights that he claims for 
himself, is the best man. I am willing to swear to this. 

What has made this country? I say again, liberty and labor. 
What would we be without labor ? I want every farmer, when 
plowing the rustling corn of June — while mowing in the perfumed 
iields— to feel that he is adding to the wealth and glory of the 
United States. I want every mechanic — every man of toil, to 
know and feel that he is keeping the cars running, the telegraph 
wires in the air ; that he is making the statues and painting the 
pictures ; that he is writing and printing the books ; that he is 
helping to fill the world with honor, with happiness, with love and 
law. 

Remember that our country is founded upon the dignity of labor 
and the equality of man. Remember this, and the second century 
will be grander than the first. 



THE PERMANENCY OF THE REPUBLIC* 

AN ORATION BY REV. WM. A. BARTLETT, D. D., PASTOR OF 
PLYMOUTH CHURCH, CHICAGO. 

DELIVERED AT AURORA, ILL. JULY Pill. 1876. 

Fellow-citizens, Ladies and Gentlemen — We celebrat 
to-day the centennial of American independence. We have come 
to this high occasion, the conclusion of the one hundredth year of 
national freedom. We stand upon a pinnacle, from which we can 
review the past and forecast the future. We see the fulfilment 
of the Fourth of July, 1776, in the Fourth of July, 1876. To-day, 
one hundred years ago, American independence had its birth. Let 
forty millions of freemen bend before this august century that to- 
day lies dead. Speak with all the noise of powder and nitro- 
glycerine, flare all the trumpets, sound every human voice ; the 
procession of the century closes to-day, and out of its dead hands 
we pick up its legacy and bear it on to a higher issue. The Fourth 
of July, 1776, was not an extemporized or sudden occasion. It 
had been approached through one hundred and fifty years of the 
history of the colonies. More than a year before the Declaration 
of Independence was adopted, Patrick Henry had said : " The 
appeal to the God of battles is all that is left us. I know not 
what course others may take ; but as for me, give me liberty or 
give me death." Sam Adams said: '•Independent we are, and 
independent we shall remain." In the little county of Mecklen- 
burgh. North Carolina, more than a year before the Philadelphia 
declaration, the people had declared their independence of the 
British government. So it was no sudden or unlooked-for thing 
when, on the 7th day of June. 1776. Richard Henry Lee, of 
Virginia, introduced his resolutions in tin; congress of the united 
colonies, asserting that " these colonies are, and of right ought to 
be, free and independent states." On the 11th day of June a 

*From Phonographic sketch, as published iu the local paper. 



ORATION REV. WILLIAM A. IJARTLETT, D.D. 71J 

committee was appointed to prepare a declaration of independence. 
Of that committee Jefferson was the chairman, and Benjamin 
Franklin, Robert R. Livingston, John Adams and Roger Sherman 
were his associates. This committee made a report upon the 2d 
day of July, and the declaration was finally passed in the form in 
which it has been read to us on the Fourth of July. It was not 
read to the people till the 8th of July, nor was it signed until some 
time after. But in the lapse of a century we can gather these 
several days together and make of them the birth-day of a great 
national life. We can hear the voice of that brazen speaker in the 
bell tower as it clangs forth: "Let freedom be proclaimed to all 
the nation and all the inhabitants thereof." And it was then and 
there proclaimed, anil the sound of it has never died away. 

It was then that Jefferson, that slender, red-haired young man, 
reared in the lap of luxury, struck to the root of all human society, 
and became the great commoner for all time. Let us not forget, too, 
that Jefferson, in writing to his daughter — he was asking about her 
progress in music, and Spanish — -said : " My daughter, remember, 
also, that I ask whether you can make a pudding, whether you can 
knit a stocking and set a hen." Then comes forward the portly 
and dignified John Hancock, who, as he grasped the pen to affix 
that well-known signature to the Declaration, said : "Gentlemen, 
we must be unanimous in this thing ; let us hang together." To 
this Dr. Ben. Franklin slyly replies : " Yes, let us hang together, 
for if we don't we shall hang separately. " And it was about that 
time that General Washington told Congress that he only had 
about seven thousand men to make that Declaration good with. 
Washington, a man whose stature was over six feet, a man with a 
round head covered with brown hair, and witli his almost expres- 
sionless face pock-marked with the ravages of that dreadful disease, 
— Washington was accustomed to put great confidence in Jonathan 
Trumbull ; and when any trouble was encountered, he would say ; 
" Let us wait and see what Brother Jonathan will say about it." 
And so we have all come to be Brother Jonathans. There, too, 
was old John Adams, whom Jefferson called the " Colossus of 
Independence." There, also, was one to whom, with pardona- 
ble pride to-day, as a namesake, you will permit me to allude — 
a man from New Hampshire, an educated physician, who, though 



712 OUli NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

an officer under the King's government, resigned his office and 
fought through the war under Gen. Stark ; the second man to sign 
the Declaration, his name coming first after John Hancock's ; an 
officer under the last royal governor of New Hampshire, and the 
first governor of the State after independence was achieved ; at 
one time the chief justice of his State. I will speak his name — it 
was Josiah Bartlett. I must not forget that man from Baltimore? 
Charles Carroll. When he came to write his name, some one 
said ; " Who knows Charles Carroll ? " It seems there were a 
groat many Carrolls in Maryland. And the patriot wrote, " Charles 
Carroll, of Carrollton." 

We come here to-day as patriots. This occasion is not one of 
section or party, for we are whelmed in the grander thought of 
nationality. To-day we all belong to one great party — that of our 
country. Let all our little individualities be this day swallowed 
up. Let us contemplate that personality of the nation, whose head 
lies in the snows of the north, whose heart beats in the fertile 
prairies of the west, and whose body stretches to the far savannahs 
of the south ; whose days are a century ; the wheels of whose pro- 
gress are driven by a forty-millionman power; whose charter is 
the Declaration of Independence ; whose articles of incorporation 
are the constitution and laws of the Union ; whose will is the law 
of the land ; who holds in his left hand the army and the prison to 
enforce his decrees, and in his right hand the cornucopia of peace 
and righteousness. This grand personality of the nation let us 
celebrate. If you stand at the foot of Mount Vesuvius, you behold 
a mountain 3,200 feet high, throwing forth lava to the heavens. 
But it is nothing compared with iEtna, which is 10,000 feet high, 
and whose eruptions are proportionately greater. And that, again, 
is nothing compared with Cotopaxi, where eternal snow and ice 
reign 18,000 feet above the level of the sea, and which throws the 
very entrails of the earth bleeding into the sky. Or you may go 
to Mount Washington, which, 6,000 feet high, is very hard to climb 
on a hot day. But it is not to be compared to Mont Blanc, 
15,000 feet high. And this, again, is not to be compared with 
Mount Everest, in the Himalayas, which sends its white crown in- 
to the face of the sun 29,000 feet above the ocean's level. I feel 
as though this day, crowned with the glorious memories of a hun- 



ORATION REV. WILLIAM A. BARTLETT, D.D. 713 

died years, were a Cotopaxi in the fiery ardor of its patriotism, a 
Mount Everest in its white purity and lofty grandeur of its asso- 
ciations. We have the day of all days. This republic has lived, 
and its life has been a century of great achievements. "We should 
be heated with the very flames of patriotism. But in the midst of 
our rejoicing comes the great question that has been iterated and 
reiterated since the signing of the great Declaration^-the question 
that our poet sang about just now. It is this : Is this government 
to be permanent? Will this Republic last? Is it a phenomenal 
speck in the world's history, or will it endure to become a yet 
greater blessing to mankind ? Have we planted its principles so 
deeply that nothing shall uproot them ? Have we built the ship of 
state so strongly that it will outride all the storms ? I invite your 
attention to the consideration of this problem. I say that this Re- 
public shall abide, because its ante-natal preparation was a pro- 
phecy of its permanence. Before it was born it had the seed of 
j)ermanence planted in its being. If you would make a full and 
fair estimate of a man, you must look at the stock from which he 
sprang. 

Take the period from the middle of the fourteenth to the mid- 
dle of the fifteenth century — one of those great ages in which 
all the future is controlled. It was an age of great popular 
uprising. The art of printing had been invented, and America 
had been discovered. Philip II. had been driven from the 
Netherlands, and the Spanish Armada had been defeated and 
scattered on the coasts of England. The Thirty Years' War had 
been fought under the great Protestant champion. Gustavus 
Adolphus had fallen on the field of Lutzen while the shouts 
of his victorious soldiers rang in his ears. It was an age in 
which the great East India Company was formed, which 
achieved control of an empire. It was an age in which great 
things were done in the world of literature and art. It was anage 
in which Galileo was compelled to say," I renounce and abjure the 
heresy of the earth's motion."' It was an age in which Tintoretto 
flashed the full light of his genius on the canvas, and in which 
Paul Veronese achieved his renown. It was an age in which 
Cervantes laughed to death that great joke of decaying feudalism 
— an absurd devotion to the forms of chivalry. It was an age in 



714 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

which Calderon wrote Ms immortal works. It was the age in 
wliich Titian played upon his one color, as Paganina played upon 
his one string. It was an age in which Michael Angelo's chisel was 
still at last, but not till his genius had been sheltered in St. Peters, 
whose dome he failed to finish. It was an age in which Richelieu 
ruled, not only in France, but over Europe — Richelieu, of whom 
it was said he made his King the first sovereign and the second 
gentleman in Europe. It was an age in which marvelous things 
were reported and believed. Travelers told of a people in the 
East who carried their heads under their arms, and related the 
discovery of a fountain in Florida whose waters conferred eternal 
youth on those who tasted them. People believed these marvels, 
and were prepared to believe others even more wonderful. 
Science was in its infancy. Astronomy was still clogged with the 
superstitions of astrology. It was an age in which the telescope 
first looked into the heavens, bringing within human vision worlds 
hitherto unseen. It was an age in which the microscope first re- 
vealed the wonders that are hid in the drop of water ; the age in 
which the barometer first felt the breath of the coming storm, and 
in which the thermometer first felt the pulse of the air. It was an 
age in which Harvey told the world of the circulation of the blood; 
in which electricity was discovered, and in which logarithms were 
brought into use, by which the angles of the stars may be measur_ 
ed and their distances calculated. It was the age of Milton and 
Descartes and Newton ; and Shakespeare, like the sun, was the 
central attraction and illumination, paling all other lights into 
insignificance. 

Now I say the seed maturing at such a time is a great seed. It 
has the germinal elements of permanency. The Pilgrims who 
landed on Plymouth Rock in 1620 and the settlers at Jamestown 
in 1607 bore the foetus of the new republic. The young child 
whose manhood we celebrate was delivered amid the snow and ice 
of winter. The wintry winds were its swaddling clothes, and the 
savage Indians sung its lullaby. But it Avas born living and hve 
it did and hve it must. If you take a seed and electrify it, it will 
germinate quicker. This great seed of liberty had been electrified 
by the struggle and victory, the suffering and achievement of the 
preceding age, and hence it came into being surcharged with life. 
Out of this great century men were picked here and there, and 



ORATION REV. WILLIAM A. BARTLETT, P.O. 715 

destined for a great work they knew not of. The truest and the 
best were planted on these shores, and the result of the work they 
did is what is celebrated to-day. 

My next point is that diverse elements are means of strength, 
although they have been considered means of weakness. You 
must get two elements to antagonize each other before you can get 
anything permanent. The machine that has the most conflicting 
forces, held under one supreme harmony, is the highest achievement 
of mechanism. It is the antagonism of forces that holds the earth 
in its place as it revolves about the sun. Even tea must have hot 
water applied to it to develop its qualities. Every particle of that 
red hot ball we call the sun is crazy, out of its head with antagon- 
isms, whose united power sends the solar heat through that bound- 
less space whose bottom only God's hand can touch. 

It has been said, too, that our climate was against us. But we 
want to bring all the climates into one. We take the climate 
where the Walrus and the Penguin feed their young on the original 
ice and snow, and of this latitude where the grain fills the mighty 
elevators, and of the south where the orange blooms, and where the 
very essence of sunshine and dew ripen's California's fruits — we 
will take them all, and we will make a food that shall develop such 
a man as the world has never seen ; not partial food, but great 
food, complete food. We will sift all the various products of this 
broad land and get their essential elements. When we feed the 
coming man, we expect great thought, great life. We will temper 
the southern man's lethargy with the activity and energy of our 
own clime. The western man's roughness shall be modified by the 
dilletanteism and refinement of the east. In that way, putting all 
these diverse elements together, we shall get in rounded complete- 
ness the American citizen. 

It is said, again, that our diversified nationality is an element of 
weakness. We have received from the old world 8.0OO.OOO immi- 
grants — enough ballast to sink any other ship of state but our own. 
We have received and welcomed the Italian with his organ, the 
Irishman with his shillelah, the Scotchman with his bagpipes, the 
German, the Englishman, the Frenchman, and every other nation- 
ality of Europe. One might well think we should be swamped by 
this mighty influx. But we have such a thing as American spirit, 






71 G OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

American character, and it is gradually leavening this great mass 
They are overborne by this dominant torce that we call American 
character. This force always has them under control. It punishes 
the guilty and honors the deserving. It takes Hesing and sends 
him to the county jail. It takes Carl Schurz and sends him to the 
United States Senate. So they are manipulated. Divide this 
Union because of the diversity of its elements ? I guess not ! It 
is bound together by too many ligaments, crossing each other in 
every direction. As well pluck out the eye because it hasn't a 
toe-nail, or cut off the toe because it cannot see. You might as 
well attempt to cut the Mississippi river with a pair of scissors, or 
dig up the Rocky Mountains with a hair-pin. We have a great 
weight to carry. We are dragging together the blocks to build 
the greatest nation of the earth. The blocks are of a stupendous 
size and weight, but they are moving to the spot. They say in 
Rhode Island they do not need the telegraph. If a man wants 
anything he hollers. We are a chemical caldron, boiling together 
all things that we may get the best. 

"Double, double toil and trouble; 
Fire, burn ; and, caldron, bubble." 

But we are making no witches' broth. We expect to produce a 
broth that will kill tyranny and override wickedness ; a broth 
which, if a true man drinks it, will make him a freeman forever. 

I want to say next that I think we shall be permanent from 
the fact, that we have had the severest test that a nation can 
encounter — the test of internal war. External war often 
strengthens a nation. But internal war — a war that makes 
every man's heart quake with dread, a war that brings into 
action every dark passion, every heart surcharged with malignity 
— well may a nation shrink from it. In that little fight of the 
revolution we only had 232,000 men in arms during the whole 
period, and but a very small number in the field at a time. 
In the war of the rebellion we called into the field 2,600,000 
soldiers, and yet the old continent did not break. It bent, but it 
held. Think of the vast powers that were brought together in 
this war. Yet notwithstanding the mighty struggle the country 
Stood. I do not propose to fight any of those battles over again, 



ORATION — ItEV. WILLIAM A. BATtTLETT, D.D. 71 7 

but would bury them iu oblivion forever, except and so far as we 
have the right to the maintenance of the principles which were at 
stake till God's day of doom. Slavery was cut out. What is 
slavery ? Is it a disease — is it a fever ? Yes, yellow fever. Is 
it a cutaneous disease ? Yes, small pox, the worst kind. Is it a 
cancer ? Yes, the firiest and deepest. Is it consumption ? Both 
lungs gone. Is it heart disease ? It is the very explosion of the 
heart, the shutting of every valve. Yet the terrible ravages of 
these combined diseases, and the terrible process of throwing them 
off — the miracle of miracles — this nation endured and lived. 
Disease is eradicated, and if we. can now only get rid of the doc- 
tors, I think we will live forever. No, my friends, that bridge 
over which the elephant has passed, the mouse need not be afraid 
to walk. 

My next argument in favor of the permanency of the republic is 
the fact that it stands growth. It endures the expansion of the 
nineteenth century, with its endless succession of new inventions 
and new ideas. There is nothing so detonating as intelligence, 
and it is a just test of any nation, can it stand enlightenment ? 
Can it endure the growth of this marvellous age of progress ? And 
no compliment can be paid to the fathers of the nation so high as 
that they laid the keel of the ship so firmly and built her of such stern 
stuff that she has been enabled to ride the century and take in all 
its growth, and not be burst asunder. They gave us a bag that 
will hold a bushel, and which will just as easily accommodate the 
contents of all the elevators in Chicago. One hundred years ago 
the fleetest motor on this continent was called " the flying ma- 
chine." It was a stage-coach that made the trip from Philadelphia 
to Boston in about a week. Within a month we have had a train 
of cars snatched from where the oysters grow to California in 
eighty hours. One hundred years ago we had two or three cities 
whose population would reach 20,000 ; now we have cities by the 
score whose population exceeds that figure, and one that was not 
born till sixty years after the Declaration crowds hard upon half a 
million. One hundred years ago there was not a woollen shirt in 
the American army that was woven by machinery, to-day the 
woollen factories of the land employ 100,000 operatives, and their 
annual pay-roll is $25,000,000. One hundred years ago the manu- 



718 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

facture of cotton scarcely existed ; last year there was 1,722,000, 
000 yards of cotton cloth manufactured in the United States, 
giving employment to 135,000 operatives, and paying them $35,- 
000,000. As to population, we had, a hundred years ago, a mere 
fringe of settlements on the Atlantic coast, numbering scarcely 
3,000,000. To-day we have 44,000,000 at least, and this is not 
an army of occupation. They are merely the videttes on the 
outposts, the picket line of the hundred millions that are sure 
to come. 

We had then eight or nine newspapers ; we have now between 
G.000 and 7,000 papers, daily and weekly. They photograph the 
life of the day. They catch its smiles and its frowns, its joys and 
sorrows, its goodness and its viciousness. Whatever hajjpens to be 
on the face gets on the photagraph. And think of their power. 
Even after they are read, they become more potent than many 
swords — as wrapping paper, as good things to stuff in a broken 
pane, and they are capital material to courpose a pullback. In 
art, in that day, the country had Trumbull and Stuart and West ; 
and to-day we have artists that vie with them all. In education, 
there were then but nine colleges in the whole country ; the past 
year there were expended in voluntary contributions to educational 
institutions $1,640,000. This takes no account of the 70,000 
schools supported at the public expense. There are 8,000,000 
children attending the public schools to-day. I cannot stop to 
speak of the inventions in the mechanic arts. They are all in the 
Centennial Exhibition. Go and see them. There is a sample of 
everything, from Noah's ark down. 

To recapitulate; I say this republic shall abide, because it had 
a pre-natal preparation and prophecy for permanency. Its seed 
was good. It will abide because it has diverse elements contri- 
buting to its strength. It will stand, because it has stood the 
greatest civil conflict that ever nation could stand and live. It has 
passed through this mighty struggle, and has arisen like a giant 
refreshed with slumber. Lastly, I say, it will abide, because it lias 
endured the marvellous growth of this wonderful age of expansion. 
These are the eternal principles that are essential to the perma- 
nency of a nation. But let me say that the future of the nation 
needs the care and thought of every patriot. Ignorance and 



ORATION REV. WILLIAM. A. BARTLETT, D.D. 719 

Buperstition will kill her. Select for your officers impure and 
venal men, shut up your schools, scoff at religion, tear down your 
churches, feed your spiritual life with a modified form of the specu- 
lations of Socrates and Seneca — pursue such a course, and the 
nation may not die a violent death, but it will become deoxygenized, 
devitalized. No animal can stand fire-damp. They suffocate and 
smother, and that may become the fate of the great American 
republic. See to it, then, as you stand upon the crest of this new- 
born century, that the national life is kept pure, and that it is 
infused with the energizing principles of right. 

You are wearied with this talk, but let me assure you I do not 
intend to go on for another hundred years. I was going to say 
that there are some great questions yet to be solved. There is 
the race question. We have not settled that yet. Our con- 
stitution and laws declare the equality of all men before the 
law, and yet we fight the principle to the bitter end. How 
long it was, and how much blood and treasure had been shed 
before we were willing to make the negro even free. Yet 
the first blood poured out in the Revolution was that of Crispus 
Attucks, a mulatto, who was shot down by British soldiery 
in the streets of Boston. The blood has cried from the earth 
till the shackles were stricken from every negro slave. But it yet 
remains for us to hold the members of that despised race fairly on 
their feet, and electrify them with the magnetism of popular 
education. 

The Indian question, too, has always been badly managed by the 
nation, I honor President Grant for his Indian policy. He would 
keep it from the army, for he is a soldier, and he knows what 
soldiers are, and he puts it into the hands of benevolent men. And 
I honor Gen. Logan for his position on this question. It is worth 
electing him six years to the Senate just for the one speech he 
recently made on the subject. I will relate but one incident to 
illustrate the worse than barbarism that has characterized our In- 
dian policy in past years. In St. Louis an Indian was put in jail 
on the charge of murder. The members of his tribe asserted his 
innocence, and sent a deputation to procure his release. According 
to the peculiar diplomacy of the officers of the bureau, these In- 
dians were first made drunk, and were then induced to sign a 



720 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

treaty deeding away 14,000,000 acres of land, and this is part of 
it on which we stand to-day. . In consideration of this treaty, the 
Indian was let out of jail, but as he went forth the commanding 
officer told the guard to shoot him in the back ; the guard obeyed, 
and the Indian was killed. That is only a specimen of our treat- 
ment of the Indian. 

Then there is the Chinaman. Every principle of justice and 
right that applies to the German, the Irishman, the Englishman or 
the Frenchman applies with the same force to the Chinaman. No 
different treatment can be accorded to him except on the philosophy 
of lying. And what are the charges brought against him ? Why, 
it is said that he can live on less money than a Californian, and 
that he is more industrious and thrifty. Good Lord ! don't let us 
go into that ! Why can't they petition to have him turned out 
because he wears a pigtail. There would be something square and 
reasonable in that. Or hold, let us banish him because he invented 
fire-crackers. I tell you, my friends, this land has yet to come up 
to the plane of the equality of all men — white men, black men, 
yellow men ; men of every clime and every tongue — all shall have 
equal rights here forever. That is the problem yet to be solved. 
The Chinaman pays $2,000,000 of customs duties, and $250,000 
poll-tax. What right have we to strip him of these taxes and yet 
refuse him the common rights of humanity ? Rather handle him 
with your larger politics. Don't trample him under foot, or you 
make him lose heart and hope for the future. 

Then, too, there are the questions of labor, of currency, and 
woman's rights. But these can well afford to wait for the present. 
Labor and currency may be relegated to scientific professors for 
solution, You want to hand them over to men who can generalize 
from past history. You cannot work them out by mass meetings 
and the popular vote. As to woman's rights, I believe, as a man 
said to me on the cars this morning — and he probably got the idea 
from a recent utterance of Gladstone — that you may pick out a 
thousand women and a thousand men, and a larger majority of the 
women will be true and pure and patriotic than of the men. In 
regard to their voting, I do not consider the question as a funda- 
mental one. It is rather an incident of governmental policy that 
will be taken cognizance of in due time. The language of the 
future. 



ADDRESS — REV. WILLIAM A. I'.AUTLKTT, V>.T>. 721 

One of the questions of the future is that of language. The 
English language is now spoken by 100,000,000 people, the German, 
by 70,000,000, the French by 40,000,000, and the Italian and 
Spanish by about 40,000,000. At the end of another century, at 
the present rate of increase, the French, Spanish and Italian lan- 
guages will be spoken by 200,000,000, the German by 225,000,- 
000 ; while the English language will convey the thoughts and 
express the emotions, will bear the history and poetry, will convey 
the rhetoric and science, of eight hundred millions of people ! 
And with that vantage-ground, the English speaking nations may 
conquer the earth with the weapons of intelligence and education. 

Defend your rights and your freedom, fellow-citizens, by keeping 
alive the sacred fires of intelligence. Never put off the armor of 
patriotism. Fling a kiss to liberty. Bare the head and bow sub- 
missively to the God of all hearts, that it has been your high 
privilege to stand in this noon-day light under these beneficent in- 
stitutions. Remember, all who would rest in the seat of free 
government, that it is not covered with cushions of luxurious down. 
It is a rock angular with righteousness, adamantine with justice, 
and snowy white with purity. Let us fit ourselves to occupy it by 
lives of blameless rectitude and unselfish devotion to freedom. 

46 



WARNINGS FOR THE FUTURE- 

AN ORATION BY HON. ANDREW SHUMAN. 

DELIVERED AT LERA, JULY 4, 1876. 

Fellow-Citizens, — I greet you with patriotic congratulation. 
The circuit of the first century of the American Republic is this 
day accomplished, and fortunate we who are living witnesses of the 
great consummation. Fortunate we who are citizens of a country 
so free, so blessed, so progressive, so glowing with ausjucious 
auguries for the future. 

Hail illustrious day ! commemorating the birth of a nation 
of free men, indexing from year to year, through 100 years, 
a national history abounding with conspicuous achievements of 
human bravery, genius and government, and now marking the 
dawn of a new century of national life. Hail illustrious day ! 
now crowned with a diadem of an hundred precious jewels, shining 
like a circle of suns in the boundless firmament of Time ! 

The occasion is an appropriate one, not only for congratulation, 
but also for retrospection and thoughtful forecast. 

We can felicitate ourselves that the past is secure ; its wars 
have been fought and won ; its labors have been performed and 
their fruits gathered ; all its trials have been survived, all its dead 
are buried, and all its events, activities and achievements are 
embalmed in those indubitable evidences of our national growth 
and greatness which are visible all around us and all over our 
favored land ; it is a century of completed history, the incidents of 
which are quite too familiar to us to need recapitulation. These 
lessons, and the instruction we have derived from our national 
experience, are irrepressibly suggestive, and ought to serve us 
to excellent purpose as practical guides. We can avoid the rocks 
upon which other ships of State have foundered, and steer clear of 



ORATION HON. ANDREW SIIUMAN. 72o 

others which wisdom, a trustworthy pilot, discerns in the billowy 
sea of civil government. 

Looking first on the bright side, then, we see much to encourage 
us hopefully to anticipate the continued advancemenl of our country, 
and the stability of our republican form of government, with 
its free institutions and its power, under popular support, to 
maintain its integrity. The fact that the Republic has survived all 
the trials, perils and embarrassments of an hundred years — having 
been neither crippled by misfortune nor spoiled by prosperity— is 
itself the most inspiring evidence that it possesses the elements of 
national endurance and permanency. Other new nations liave in 
the meantime arisen and disappeared, while old ones have dis- 
solved and vanished from the map of the world. Only a few 
which existed when ours was born are greater to-day than they 
were then, and none of them — not one — has in any respect 
progressed as ours has in the elements of civilization and real 
greatness and power. England and Germany and Russia alone of 
all the older nations, are stronger and greater now than they were 
a century ago. France, has been twice humbled and dismembered ; 
Italy and Spain and Austria have each had their national vicis- 
situdes and disasters, by which their progress has been retarded, 
their glory tarnished, and their territory contracted. Turkey, 
besotted with licentiousness and crazed with a fanaticism that is 
as stubborn as it is stupid, is still the "sick man" of Europe, 
and becomes sicker continually, his miserable and useless life 
being spared only because his neighbors, each coveting his pos- 
sessions, are afraid to go to war with each other over the question 
as to which of them shall secure the largest and best part of 
his territory and navigable waters. The other and smaller 
nationalities of Europe are likewise spared only as a matter of 
prudence and discretion by the greater powers, the jealousy of 
these of each other being the only guaranty those have of con- 
tinued life. Crossing over to Africa and Asia, we find that their 
ancient nations are standing still, decaying, or being gradually 
absorbed by foreign conquest, the only exceptions being China 
and Japan, the former of which merely vegetates, as she has 
vegetated for centuries, behind her stone wall of exclusiveness, 
and the latter of which has of iate given hopeful signs of a 



724 ouii National jItmlek. 

progressive impulse l>y her admiration of our modem system of 
popular education and the importation of foreign machinery of 
agriculture, manufacture and transportation. As regards the 
South American and Central American nationalities, they are as 
unstable as the weather in March, and as unprogressive as their 
long-smothered volcanoes. Brazil is the solitary exception, but it 
is questionable whether even her progressive tendencies of the 
current epoch will outlive her present wise and liberal ruler, 
to whose good sense she owes her tranquility and prosperity. Our 
neighbor Republic of Mexico, of whom we have so often and 
so anxiously expected much, but been always disappointed, is but 
little better off to-day than when she was a dependency of Spain, 
and, unless her government should hereafter more successfully 
than of late years demonstrate its ability to compel her marauding 
free-booters to cease their depredatory incursions across the border, 
it is merely a question of time when the American eagle will 
pounce down upon her and mercifully spread the stars and stripes 
all over her mountains and plains. 

And this leads us to the consideration of that first manifested 
symptom of a decline in the patriotism of a free people — indiffer- 
ence to political duty on the part of good citizens — a symptom which 
bodes no good to a Republic, the successful maintenance of which 
is entirely dependent upon the faithful exercise of the elective 
franchise by its men of intelligence, honesty and public spirit. It 
is a fact to which we cannot shut our eyes, that this is the most 
alarming cause of apprehension now existent in this country — this 
growing indifference to the most vital duty of citizenship by the 
very class of men who have the most at stake in the honorable 
and efficient management of our public affairs — the men of 
property, conscience and thoughtfulness. It is the neglect of this 
class of men to which most of our political evils are attributable. 
They too often stand aloof from active participation in the work 
and duty of politics, and it follows, as a matter of course, that 
selfish and unprincipled men, by means of those methods and 
appliances which the professional politician knows so well how to 
employ, are left to manage affairs, not for the public welfare, but 
for the subservience of individual interests and the gratification of 
unworthy ambitions. Thus the powers of unconscionable greed 



ORATION — HON. ANDREW SHUMAN. 725 

and unreasoning ignorance, the one becoming the hired servant of 
the other, usurp the reins of government, which should never 
for an instant be intrusted out of the control of the sober- 
minded, intelligent, tax-paying, patriotic portion of the community. 
And thus it is that corrupt rings and venality in office become 
possible, and that one designing man or a few sharpers in politics 
so often succeed in fastening themselves upon the public treasury, 
like leeches, sucking themselves full and fat at the people's 
expense. Wherever and whenever in this country corruption 
creeps into our legislative bodies and into our public offices, 
the so-called " good citizens," who naturally become disgusted and 
indignant at the disgraceful results, are generally responsible, not 
because of their own acts, but because of their inexcusable non- 
action at the proper time, when they might have prevented bad 
men from worming themselves into positions which should never 
be given to any but good men. It is an established theorem in our 
modern political philosophy, that official representatives and agents 
usually reflect the average intelligence and morality of their 
immediate constituents — that is, those who by their votes elect 
them. Now, we are aware that, in almost every town, district, or 
city in this country, the majority of the population is fairly intelli- 
gent, honorable, and patriotic. This being so, when corrupt 
or unworthy men are elected to office, it only proves that a 
majority of those entitled to the elective franchise virtually 
disfranchised themselves, either by failing to take an active part 
in the primary caucuses, at which better candidates could have 
been selected, or by neglecting to do their duty as electors at 
the polls, where better men could have been elected. 

Happily, of late there have been evidences of a general re-awak- 
ening to the importance of all good citizens taking an active part 
in politics. They are just discovering the sad truth that while 
they have been politically asleep, dreaming pleasant dreams of 
security, wakeful plunderers have been despoiling their treasures ; 
that they have too long left to others the performance of duties 
which can never safely be intrusted to proxies ; and now, appalled 
and indignant, they have arisen and gone to work with the one 
grand purpose of making up for lost time. Such popular awaken 
ings and uprisings are sublime and salutary. Their effect upon 



726 OUK NATIONAL .JUHILKE. 

the body politic is similar to that of a rushing torrent through a 
long-stagnating pool of water, cleansing and purifying it. But 
what if the rushing torrent should never come? What if the 
waters of the stagnant pool should be left undisturbed, to thicken 
with accumulated putridity, to breed malarial vapors, and contam- 
inate all the air around it with noxious offensiveness, without ever 
receiving a purifying visitation from the heaven or the earth ! 
Would not the ardent midsummer sun, angered at the poisoner of 
his medium of radiation, bring the power of his irresistible shafts 
to bear upon it, evaporating and dispersing in noisome atoms, 
drying up its foul bed, and covering it over with a crop of the 
rankest weeds? It is fortunate for our Republic that the mass of 
intelligent, patriotic citizens do occasionally, even though spasmod- 
ically, wake up to the necessity of cleansing and purifying the 
stagnating pool of politics ; but what if, at some period in the 
coming century, they should neglect to awaken from one of their 
sleeps of apathy and indifference, and the foul stagnation should 
be left to thicken and putrify, without ever receiving a cleansing visi- 
tation from the heaven or the earth ! Would not the sun of 
Destiny, angered at the noisome offense, evaporate its elements, 
and fill its place upon the earth with rankest weeds ? This — this 
my fellow countrymen, is the most solemn danger to our national 
future — this possibility that, at some time, those of the people who 
have the most direct interest in the proper and honorable adminis- 
tration of public affairs will fall into such a deep stupor of political 
indifference that they will awaken, if ever at all, only to see their 
Republic in irretrievable ruins, and themselves the helpless slaves 
of an usurper or a conqueror ! If there is one warning that should 
be sounded abroad over all tliis \'\tv and broad land, more loudly 
and emphatically than all others, it is this : If they would preserve 
their liberties and maintain their national integrity, let nil citizens of 
intelligence and patriotic feeling participate actively and earnestly in 
all political movements, hold in check the over-presumptuous, ever- 
selfish arts and devices of demagogism, and keep the reins of 
government, both local and general, in their own strong hands. 

hAll the American people ought to be active politicians. They 
ought to study political principles, systems and economies, and the 
science of statesmanship, with the same interest with which in the 



ORATION — IION. ANDREW SHUMAN. 727 

schools they study mathematics and the practical sciences. In a 
Republic, where the individual interests and personal liberty of 
every man are dependent upon the efficient administration of the 
government, politics is as much a part of the citizen's business as 
is the pursuit by which he earns Ins daily bread. Taxation, pro- 
tection of individual and popular rights, and private as well as 
public security are matters of politics, and therefore of vital con- 
cern to every man. The citizens are the sovereigns — they, in 
their aggregate capacity, are the possessors and rulers of the land. 
To understand how to rule wisely should be their ambition, and 
this they cannot understand unless they study politics, familiarizing 
themselves with the principles of Government, the spirit and letter 
of the organic laws, and the causes and effects of political action. 
Unless the mass of intelligent citizens do become politicians, we 
will be governed by an oligarchy, consisting of an irresponsible 
class of men, who will make politics their business — they will be 
the governing class — and class government in a Republic would in 
time degenerate into as obnoxious and burdensome a system as 
would be an absolute dictatorship, towards which it would gradu- 
ally tend, and in which, if permitted to have uninterrupted sway, 
it would ultimately culminate. 

Other dangers there are in our pathway into the now veiled 
future, which are equally deserving of sober thought. Among 
these is that aggressive phase in our human nature — we will call it 
unreasoning selfishness — which tends to the assumption of exces- 
sive license on the one hand and to bigoted intolerance on the 
other. I mean that repulsive, anti-republican manifestation of 
supreme self-assertion which, in one extreme, develops itself in 
communism, and, in the other, in persecution for opinion's sake. 
These, if suffered to gain power, would in time eventuate in lega- 
lized piracy and plunder on the one band, or legalized tyranny on 
the other, both being equally in conflict with the spirit and har- 
monious existence of popular government. Being a heterogeneous 
people, with a variety of tastes, creeds, customs, prejudices and in- 
terests, we must, if we would continue to live together in peace and 
harmony, be exceedingly tolerant towards each other in matters of 
opinion, and exceedingly respectful of each other's personal rights 
and prerogatives as citizens who stand on an equality under the law. 



728 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Then, too, we must carefully cherish our peculiar system of free 
schools and guard it against encroachment from sectarian agencies 
or other influences which would seek to transform it into an instru- 
mentality of bigotry, factious ambition, social disorder or political 
mischief. More depends upon our schools, their faithful mainten- 
ance and their efficient management, for the future of this Republic, 
than upon all other agencies and influences combined. Popular 
intelligence is the rock upon which our national structure rests, ami 
so long as the youth of each generation — the poor man's as well 
as the rich man's children — shall freely enjoy the advantages of 
liberal education, the nation will have its strongest possible guar- 
anty of continued life, and popular liberty an impregnable safe- 
guard. 

In conclusion, it may reasonably be anticipated by the patriotic 
citizen of this grand Republic whose peculiar privilege it is this 
day to witness the close of the first and the dawning of a second 
century of national existence, that there will be a glorious future 
as there has been a glorious past ; that our posterity will be as 
faithful to their sacred trust as we have been and as our forefathers 
have been ; that those who will follow us as the possessors of this 
priceless inheritance of national blessings, will appreciate it as we 
do — that they will be thoughtful patriots, true and faithful citizens, 
moral and intelligent men. Let us, in the earnestness of our 
patriotic devotion, in the fulness of our hopeful and trustful 
hearts, pray to Him who is the Supreme Ruler of Nations that 
they may be so, and that centuries after our poor dust shall have 
mingled with that of the patriots, the heroes, and the statesmen of 
America's eventful history, the Republic of the United States, free 
and independent, will still maintain, with ever-increasing luster, its 
proud place among the nations of the earth. 



AMERICA AND JUDAISM. 

AN ADDRESS BY REV. N. I. BENSON, D. D. 

DELIVERED AT THE JEWISH TEMT-LE, JACKSON, MISS., JULY 4, 1876. 

When the hoary hand of time passed the hour of midnight in 
the preceding day, America had passed a century, and entered 
upon a new one ; and in consequence the same enthusiastic millions 
of people inhabiting its free soil and enjoying the liberty and 
energy's reward sent forth to the King of all kings, Ruler of all 
nations, a thanksgiving which was appropriate for past dispensa- 
tions, and an earnest solicitation for future grace. The enthusiasm 
manifested to-day by America's children is one of no idle clamor 
or noisy shouting — it is the voice of the people, acknowledging the 
gifts of their divine Ruler. If anything in the wide world should 
call forth a national, and in fact, a universal enthusiasm, it is the 
celebration of this anniversary, in which a grateful people can 
behold the realization of what were but hopes, one hundred years 
ago. The grievances stated by a suffering people in the Declara- 
tion of Independence, one of which alone were sufficient to impede 
the progress and cultivation of any class of people, when the free- 
dom of speech was not tolerated, when the chains of despotism 
were around their necks, when the yoke of oppression by the tyran- 
nical laws of an unscrupulous tyrant, as the then King of Great 
Britain was, where the germs of greatness could not be developed, 
— then I say it was a time to revolt and throw off the yoke of op- 
pression, and to endeavor to show to that tyrannical monarch, that 
man has no master, save one, their Creator. And they rallied ! 
they harmonized ! and with one unanimous voice the representa- 
tives of 40,000.000 people proclaimed themselves free and indepen- 
dent. With one unanimous struggle they threw off the yoke of 
despotism, and laid before the world their pent-up grievances which 
gave cause to their revolt, And they succeeded ! and what, my 



730 OUH NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

friends, think you was the cause of their success ? Perhaps you may 
think it was physical strength which produced these wonders ! Oh 
no ! for we are well aware that the English army outnumbered 
the Americans vastly in equipments, in regularity, in military 
tactics and manoeuvres. What then was the secret spring of suc- 
cess ? Ah, my friends, it was right against might! Yes, my 
friends, America had a most noble ally right in its ranks ; that ally 
was right arrayed against might ; and thank God, in this in- 
stance, right won the day. Behold, was it not Providential during 
the war, where a handful of ragged men drives out from its soil 
a well regulated army! Yes, my friends, it was the hand of God, 
and America is much likened to my beloved creed Judaism. For 
behold, were we not slaves in Egypt under a tyrannical Pharoah, and 
by the goodness of the Almighty God, He sent unto us Moses, who 
carried out the word of God according to revelation. Even so was 
America in bondage to Britain's despotic monarch, and God hearing 
the voice of the oppressed, sent unto you George Washington, 
America's Moses, who, inspired b}^ God, led the ragged and suffer- 
ing men entrusted to him by Congress, to the field of' glory and 
triumph; and as the children of Israel went out of the land of 
Egypt unto perpetual liberty, and finally entered into the promised 
land in glory and triumph, even so did Washington by his patri- 
otism finally and eventually conquer his opponents, and America 
became the beacon of perpetual liberty, the wonder of the world, 
a land 'which we may indeed call the land of milk and honey. 

In no country is labor so highly respected, and so well remune- 
rated as in the United States ; and in none therefore are the labor- 
ing class so happy, and we may add enlightened. No restrictions 
are laid on industry ; political privileges are extended to all, and 
the humblest citizen may raise himself to the proudest position in 
the Republic. 

Our mechanics have brought a high degree of ingenuity as well 
as skill to their work ; and through their means America has be- 
come justly famous for her inventions and improvements. Among 
a host of things that might be mentioned, it is undeniable that the 
best locks, life-boats, printing presses and agricultural implements, 
come from America. 

The labor of building up the resources of a new country has as 



ADDliKSS UEV. N. J. BENSON, D.I). 731 

yet left the people of the United States little time and opportunity 
for cultivating literature and the arts. Yet we point with pride 
to our metaphysician Edwards ; our lexicographer, Noah Webster; 
our mathematicians, Bodwitchand Rittenhouse; our naturalists, the 
Audubons ; our novelists, Irving and Cooper; our poets, Bryant 
and Longfellow; our sculptors, Powers and Greenough ; our 
painters, Copely, Stuart, Trumbull, Vanderlyn, Allston, Peale and 
Sully. If there is one thing on which, more than all others, 
America may pride herself, and found high hopes of stability for 
her glorious institutions, it is her system of common schools ; sin- 
offers the advantage of education to the young without money and 
without price, convinced that their enlightenment is her best safe- 
guard. Now, having thus enumerated the results of a hundred 
years' growth, let us see what could be the cause of this prosperity. 
In reviewing back the history of other nations, we cannot behold 
the same results. Instead of progress and amelioration, decay and 
strife hath proved its career. The secret upon which these noble 
results are based, is framed in a very few words in the Constitu- 
tion, wherein is quoted the following words : " Congress shall make 
no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the 
free exercise thereof ; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of 
the press." Ah, noble words ! upon these rests the progress of 
the nation. To how many countries has the non-observance of 
these words proved a downfall and ruin? How many millions of 
people have been put to death in the universe on account of the 
non-adoption of this noble principle; but America, prosperous and 
fortunate country, thou hast taken unto thee a precept which will 
eventually develop itself; and the world will look upon thee with 
admiration and respect. Never will there be in this soil a gov- 
ernor as Appeles, in the days of the Maccabees, who endeavored to 
enforce conformity in the religious observances and to abolish the 
laws of Moses; nor will there nestle in thy bosom tyrants like 
Syro Grecians, who having discovered the fact that the. lews would 
not use any arms on the Sabbath, even in self-defense, and taking 
advantage of this scrupulous observance of the holy day of the 
Lord, attacked a cave near Jerusalem wherein secreted themselves 
a thousand pious worshippers of Cod, and slaughtered them with- 
out mercy ; nor will there ever be on this soil a madman like An- 



732 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

tiochus, who, because they would not renounce their ancestral 
faith caused, a mother and her seven sons to be put to a death the 
most ignominious by tortures the most revolting. 

The spirit of liberty — liberty of conscience, liberty of thought 
and speech, the inalienable right of man, has made rapid progress 
upon the free soil of this vast and blessed Republic, which has been 
inhabited by human beings bailing hither from all parts of the 
globe; and Israelites too have sought and found shelter and protec- 
tion under the banner of the stars and stripes, and settled them 
selves also in the State of Mississippi. Pursuing the annals of 
this State we discover traces of Jewish steps in your midst as far 
back as at least a half a century ago. Most of the early Jewish 
inhabitants of this State have already long since departed from this 
world of sorrow and woe for the unknown regions of eternity. 
But some of them by their constant adherence to the laws of 
equity and justice, of loyalty and benevolence, left behind them 
imprints more lasting than monuments of cold marble, and which 
will never be erased from the memory of Jew or Gentile. 

Judaism teaches the equality of person and universal salvation. 
And it is but just to acknowledge that you, my Christian friends, 
have tacitly expressed your acknowledgment that the Jew is as 
good as any other man, that we all have but one Father ; one God 
created us all ; and by that acknowledgment, which to us speaks 
louder than words, you have expressed your belief that in the 
kingdom of Heaven, there is no distinction made between the Jew 
and Gentile. 

Then indeed, may I uplift my hands to Providence and thank 
Him, upon this anniversary of the Declaration of Independence, 
that He, in his benign grace, caused the day to dawn at last, when 
Jew and Gentile shall walk hand and hand in life, to see at last, 
that they are indispensable to each other, and I trust that the 
Creator of the Universe shall strengthen and cement these filial 
bonds of brotherhood, that when our children shall celebrate one 
hundred years hence, that this bond of brotherhood shall have 
become so strong and mutual, that no false doctrines, nor sectarian 
dogmas, shall be able to sever not even the smallest link. 



CENTENNIAL ADDEESS. 

AN" ADDRESS BY MISS SARAH DOHERTY". 

DELIVERED IN THE CATHOLIC CHURCH, AT JACKSON, MISS., JULY 4, 

1876. 

Ladies and Gentlemen. — Highly do T appreciate the honor 
conferred upon me on this bright Centennial morn — that of being 
chosen to crown the banner, which has for so many years waved 
over the heads of all the brave and noble of our fair land. 

What heart among us will not feel a thrill of pride, when we 
remember the glory which this standard has brought to our 
country ? 

Let us pass over all that would cause us to experience a pang of 
sorrow, or of any other emotion which would be unworthy of this 
great day. Let us consider the struggle of our forefathers — how 
they bravely pressed forward amid trials and hardships, at which 
the very heart sickens, determined, cost what it would, that this 
tri-colored flag should nobly be unfurled over " the land of the free 
and the home of the brave." Witness the labors of Washington, 
the great " father of his country." Through how many reverses 
did he not press onward. Then there were our brave Putnam, 
Warren, Montgomery, Adams, Lee, Marion, and a host of others, 
all of whom devoted their noblest efforts to the cause of liberty. 

If Washington, Jefferson, Franklin, Sherman, Livingston, Adams 
and Lee could preside over the grand festival which is now being 
celebrated all over the United States, how their bosoms would 
heave with emotions of gratitude to God who has preserved the 
Republic during the past century. It would recall to their minds 
the first grand festival of this nation — the 4th of July, 1776, when 
under their auspices the United Colonies were first declared free 
and independent States. 

Oh, what exultant joy must have filled theheart of every devoted 



734 OUR NATIONAL JtJlJILEE. 

republican, when, in the mouth of July, 1777, he beheld for the 
first time, the Star-Spangled Banner nobly waving over our be- 
loved land. 

This Centennial Feast should cause every Catholic heart to 
thrill with special emotions of gratitude. The Constitution of the 
country provides for the free exercise of religion, and see how this 
provision has conducted to the propagation of our holy faith. 

From the Atlantic-washed coasts to the Pacific-girt shores of 
California and Oregon the Roman Catholic Faith is preached and 
our Sacramental Lord has His devoted adorers. Really then have 
we not cause to rejoice on this hundredth anniversary of the 
declaration of Independence. 

Truly the freedom guaranteed to us by the public has not always 
been inviolate, but we are willing that bygones should be bygones. 
We will voluntarily drink of Lethe's limpid waters, that whatever 
may cause a moment's sadness on this glorious Centennial morn 
may be consigned to oblivion. 

Yes, let us glory in our country. Let us be faithful to its cause. 
Let us never consent to see its glory dwindle away, or to see it 
lose the high rank it has held among the nations! Let England 
boast of being the sun whose bright beams enlighten and fructify 
the remotest corners of the earth ! Let France claim to be the 
moon, whose mild, steady, and cheering rays are the delight of all 
nations, consoling them in darkness and making their dreariness 
beautiful ! But our United States has proved to be a Joshua at 
whose command both the sun and moon stand still ! Yes, the war of 
the revolution proves to England that the noble sons of America 
spurn the yoke of British tyranny. And France too, on more 
than one occasion has discovered that the offsprings of out Repub- 
lic will nobly defend their rights. 

We Catholics have the greatest cause for glorying in America. 
Columbus, the great discoverer of the new world, was a Catholic. 
But for his deep enthusiasm, his humble perseverance, his meek 
and gentle remonstrances, the vast lands of America might yet be 
unknown. The first act of our hero after he landed on the soil of 
America was to kneel and kiss the earth, returning thanks to the 
Great Being whom the Roman Catholics had taught him to adore. 
ITis next act was to erect a cross, before which the Roman Catholic 



ADDRESS MISS SARAH DOHERTY. i 60 

Priest who accompanied him on his voyage offered up a sacrifice of 
thanksgiving. 

Oh, then, let us rejoice, let us give thanks to the Lord, whose 
mercy endureth forever. And now, oh noble banner, accept thy 
crown. May it, a token of the esteem we bear for tbee, be to thee 
an em-bleni of the glory which we humbly hope and pray that thou 
wilt bring to our fair land. 



THE FUNDAMENTAL PEINOIPLES OF 1776. 

AN ORATION BY HON. JOHN W. WATTS, GOV. OF ALA 

DELIVERED AT MONTGOMERY, ALA., JULY 4, 1S7G. 

Ladies and Fellow-Citizens. — One hundred years ago this 
day, a body of patriots, delegates from thirteen separate yet united 
Colonies, in solemn Congress assembled, proclaimed the immortal 
truths just read in your hearing. These Colonies were established 
by Great Britain, and for years had been under the government 
of Great Britain. They had their Legislative Assemblies, and 
had been accustomed, under charters from the British Crown, to 
exercise the powers of local self-government. But as these Colon- 
ies grew in population and wealth, the British Parliament, in an 
evil hour, assumed the authority to legislate for them in all cases 
whatsoever, denying the right to the people of representation in 
Legislative Assemblies. This usurpation, so inconsistent with the 
spirit of English freedom, aroused the spirit of independence in 
America. A series of unjust and oppressive measures towards 
this country, by the Crown and Parliament, created a spirit of in- 
tense indignation and determined resistance, and thus fostered that 
spirit of independence which freed the Colonies from British 
tyranny and established American freedom. 

Before the 4th of July, 1776, the Colonies had been separate 
and independent peoples in all that appertained to their domestic 
affairs ; and they were united only for common defence against 
common danger. So they remained separate and independent 
States, when this Declaration of Independence was made good at 
the point of the sword. The articles of Confederation made dur- 
ing the progress of the Revolutionary war, carefully preserved this 
separation and independence. So that, when, after their indepen- 
dence of Great Britain was acknowledged by the British Parlia- 
ment; and the Lnited States became a nation amongst nations. 



ORATION HON. JOHN W. WATTS. 16i 

these separate and independent States, not only made their sepa- 
rate and independent State constitutions, each for itself ; hut all 
united made a common constitution through their separate delegates 
in convention assembled. This common constitution, now known 
as the Federal constitution, was submitted separately to each of 
these separate and independent States, for voluntary ratification or 
rejection. So that, when each of these States had adopted this 
common constitution it thereby became the constitution of each 
one of these States, the supreme law of the land, as firmly bind- 
ing on the people thereof as were the respective State constitutions 
on the separate people of each State. 

The original thirteen States thus became one nation for inter- 
course with foreign powers ; one nation for foreign commerce and 
commerce between the several states ; one nation for common de- 
fence and for the preservation of the liberties of each and all ; but 
they were and are separate and independent of each other and of 
the Federal government, in all their domestic and home affairs. 
" Distinct as the billows — one, as the sea." 

One of the great principles of this Declaration of Independence, 
and of the government founded thereon, is that those whom the 
people select to represent them in the different departments of 
government are the agents and servants of the people ; and the 
offices these agents and servants fill are not their private property, 
but they are great public trusts, to be executed with an eye single 
to the good of the great body of the people. These offices are not 
property to be bought and sold, and their emoluments, privileges 
and influences are not to be used to corrupt and debauch the virtue 
and integrity of the people. But they are the instrumentalities 
through which liberty is to be protected and preserved, prosperity 
promoted, and general tranquillity and happiness accomplished. 
This idea of offices being property sprang' from countries where 
kings and lords ruled by " divine right," and where offices were 
transmitted from father to son, like lands and chattels. 

You will permit me, fellow-citizens, to remark, without any 
allusion to mere party politics, that one of the saddest and most 
portentous evils of our times is the prevalence of the idea that the 
public offices are the property of the persons holding them. From 
such perverted notions spring corruption of officers, corruption of 

47 



738 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

public virtue and a demoralized people. The common expression, 
when applied to the offices of government, that " to victors belong 
the spoils " is a perversion of the theory of our republican govern- 
ment ; and its practice is destructive of the ends of all good gov- 
ernment. Offices are not " spoils " in a republican government. 
The expression itself sprang from the corruptest times of old 
Home ; and it is but a translation of one sentence uttered by 
Catiline to his conspirators. Such a sentiment should receive no 
countenance in a Christian land, in a republican government in the 
19th century, and especially should it be denounced on the one- 
hundredth anniversary of our national independence, when the 
purity of our patriot fathers is to be commended to the love and 
admiration of our people. 

Another of the grand truths announced in this Declaration of 
Independence is that all men are created equal in political rights. 
In the formation of governments and in the administration of 
governmental powers this equality becomes inequality only by 
differences of intellectual jwwer, and of public and private virtue. 
And from this equality of political rights springs that principle of 
religious freedom which is the peculiar privilege and glory of the 
American people. Each man here has the right, unmolested by 
princes, powers or potentates, to worship God according to the 
dictates of his own conscience. Our government establishes no 
religion and fosters none, whilst all are protected by the broad 
tegis of constitutional liberty. Freedom of religion, freedom of 
the press and freedom of the people to petition for redress of all 
grievances, the right of trial by jury, and the writ of habeas corpv's, 
are watchwords of our republican faith. 

To understand properly, and to appreciate rightly, the grand 
results which have sprung from the establishment of such a gov- 
ernment on such a Declaration of Independence, we must turn our 
eyes and through the light of history look back to one hundred 
years ago. 

We then had an East, a North and a South, but no "West. The 
West, from the mountains of Virginia to the coast of the Pacific, 
was an unbroken forest — trees and rocks and rivers and lakes — 
unseen by civilized man. 

From Georgia to Philadelphia, and from New Hampslure to 



ORATION HON. JOHN W. WATTS. 739 

Philadelphia, the seat of government, the Delegates of the Conti- 
nental Congress traveled on horseback. The railroads which 
sprang into existence from the application of the expensive power 
of steam, as a motive power, and which now by iron bands connect 
all parts of our country, were then unknown. A sparse and mainly 
agricultural people, with few wants, and those supplied by the 
productions of the soil, occupied the States. Commerce, manufac- 
tures and the arts, which now constitute the wealth and pride of 
the land, were little known to our forefathers. But under the 
benign influence of our free institutions, they have become the 
controlling elements of the power and progress of our country. 

Within these one hundred years the thirteen States of revolu- 
tionary times have swelled to thirty-eight separate and independ- 
ent States, and the three millions of population have increased to 
forty millions. The forests, the rocks, the rivers and the lakes, 
which constituted our West in revolutionary times have become 
the homes of civilized men, and 25 States have been added to our 
National family, with rights and privileges on an equal footing 
with the original thirteen. The great wave of population has ex- 
tended from the shores of the Atlantic across mountains, lakes and 
rivers, to the shores of the Pacific. From sunrise to sunset. And 
now these thirty-seven States and forty millions of people (under 
the same Constitution and Union, speaking the same language, under 
the same propitious bend of the heavens, worshipping the same 
God), with one heart and with one destiny, are to-day paying tribute 
to the valor and wisdom of our patriot fathers, and shouting 
hosannahs to the benefactors of mankind. Voices from the North, 
from the East, from the South, and from the new-born West, 
unite to-day, 187G, in one grand National chorus of praise to 
the heroes and statesmen, the patriots and philosophers of 177G. 

In Independence Hall, one hundred years ago, Richard Henry 
Lee, a Southern man, first proposed in Continental Congress, reso- 
lutions declaring that the thirteen Colonies "are of right, and ought 
to be free and independent States." John Adams, a son of the 
North, seconded these resolutions. Thomas Jefferson, a son of the 
South, wrote the immortal Declaration of Independence ; John 
Hancock, a son of the North, the presiding officer of the Con- 
gress, first signed his name to that document, which pledged the 



740 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

lives, the fortunes and the sacred honor of its signers for its 
support. 

On this day fifty years ago Thomas Jefferson, the author of the 
Declaration, and John Adams, " the Colossus " of its support on 
the floor of the Continental Congress, both died, and together took 
their flight to the land of spirits. Providence vouchsafed to them 
no common boon in not only permitting them to live to see the 
consummation of their great work, but in permitting each, in his 
turn, the one as the successor of the other, to enjoy the high priv- 
ilege of being the Chief Magistrate of that government their joint 
labors established. In youth each labored for the rights of the 
Colonies ; in manhood they stood shoulder to shoulder in the Con- 
tinental Congress, and pledged " their lives, their fortunes and 
their sacred honor " to maintain the liberties of America, and in 
death, when all their labors were over, they were not parted, but 
together they appeared before the High Chancery of Heaven. 
May we not suppose that holy lips uttered and the Heavenly courts 
echoed the welcome plaudit, " Well done, good and faithful 
servants." 

Another one of the signers of this Declaration, Benjamin 
Franklin, though born in Massachusetts, a delegate from Pennsyl- 
vania in the Continental Congress, cannot be assigned to any 
clime or country. He belongs to universal mankind. He snatched 
the live thunder from the clouds of Heaven, and with his key and 
kite tamed it and made it subservient to the purposes of man. 

And now, by the power of science, this " live thunder v is 
driven all over our and other lands, on railroad highways ; 
and along iron cables it flashes from continent to continent and 
makes the civilized world one universal brotherhood. 

By its means the man on the golden shores of California speaks, 
face to face, as it were, to his friend in New York ! The man 
in Boston talks familiarly with his friend in Liverpool ; and Europe, 
Asia and America, hold daily converse together ! The wonders 
achieved within these hundred years, through the developments of 
physical science, enable us to rival, if not surpass, apparently, one 
of the miracles of Holy "Writ. 

We are told that Joshua commanded the sun to stand still, and 
the sun stood still until the battle was fought and the victory won. 



ORATION HON. JOHN W. AVATTS. 741 

But witness the miracle which electricity works for us. "What is 
done to-day in Liverpool up to two o'clock p. m. is known here in 
Montgomery at ten o'clock a. m. of to-day ! Not only seemingly 
the sun has stood still ; but the great clock of Old Time has 
seemed to turn hack its pounderous wheels four hours ! "Wonder- 
ful power of prophecy which, through Franklin's "live thunder," 
then enables us, at ten o'clock this morning, to know and tell what 
transpires at Liverpool this evening! 

On the fourth of July, a hundred years ago, South Carolina 
united her voice with that of New Hampshire, and the whole thir- 
teen States, all of the East, all of the North and all of the then 
South, united their voices in jn-oclaiming independence ; and thus 
mingled their blood on many a hard-fought field, in maintaining it. 

George "Washington, a son of the South, the chief military 
commander of the whole, inarched through a wilderness of dangers 
to crown his grand triumph at Yorktown. And he, by the voice 
of mankind, was the " first in war, the first in peace, and the first 
in the hearts of his countrymen." 

In the Convention of States of 1787, the men of the North, the 
East, the "West and the South, united in framing the " magna 
charta " of our liberty and Union ! 

The 4th of July is therefore, by all the sacred memories of the 
past ; by the remembrances of common sufferings and common 
dangers ; and by the common hopes, a brighter future. Our 
Fourth of July, the Declaration of Independence, is our Declara- 
tion of Independence. The Constitution is our Constitution, and 
the Union, the child of the Constitution, is our Union ! And 
we can utter with sincere hearts the words of the great "Webster, 
" Union and liberty now and forever, one and inseparable ! " 

In former days on the 4th day of July the hoarse voice of party 
was still. "We made it our national holiday, The trials, the 
triumphs, and the glories of our common ancestry were the 
themes of our discourse, and thousands of tongues grew eloquent 
over the valor of our revolutionary soldiers and the wisdom 
of our revolutionary fathers. If in the bitterness of party strife 
ought had been said to offend, on the 4th of July, that " charity 
which thinketh no evil " covered with its broad mantle of forgive- 
ness the wrongs of the past. 



712 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Tt is true, that for the last fifteen years, the 4th of Jiriy lias not 
been commemorated as of yore in the South. We seemed to have 
forgotten the prophetic words of John Adams, written in July 
1776, that it (the day) "ought to be commemorated as the day of 
deliverance, by solemn act of devotion to Almighty God, from one 
end of the continent to the other, from this time forward for ever- 
more." 

It was the late contest between the two great sections of the 
Union, begun in 1861 and ended in 1865, which suspended our 
celebration of the 4th of July. This contest has, in its principles 
and purposes, been greatly misunderstood in the North, and even 
amongst our own people. It never was the purpose of the South, 
in commencing that fearful contest, to destroy the principles of 
free government embodied in the Constitution of the United States. 
Quite the reverse was the purpose. It was not to destroy but to 
preserve this great charter of liberty from what was su2iposed to 
be an attack on some of its vital principles, that the South 
commenced that contest. The Constitution which the Confederate 
States made for their own government, and which they struggled 
to maintain for four long years, shows that the South was not the 
less a lover of liberty, because she sought to separate from the 
North. 

But the contest was ended by the overthrow of the Confederate 
cause and power ; and we of the South, I trust, with becoming 
fortitude and dignity, have acquiesced in the results of that contest. 
And whilst we may have thought that harsh treatment has been 
extended to us, in the 11 years of peace, since the war ended; still, 
now that the strife and din of war are hushed, and the exacer- 
bations engendered have, by the mellowing influences of time, ceased 
to agitate our bosoms, we are and have been ready to renew our 
faith to the Constitution, and to the Union which is the offspring 
of the Constitution. 

This is the Centennial of our National Independence. Let it 
be as well our National jubilee. If anyone complains of us for 
the past few years let him remember, that when the storm on the 
ocean arises, shuts out the sunlight, of heaven and covers with its 
blackness the whole horizon ; moved by the wind the billows ride 
mountain high on the surface of the sea, and with fury lash the 



ORATION — HON. JOHN W. WATTS. 743 

shore. The storm may end ; the clouds which darkened 'the sky 
may all be gone ; the wind's hollow sound may be silent ; tho 
sunshine, in all its beauty and magnificence, may reappear ; and 
yet for hours, may be for days, the waves, the children of the storm, 
may still lash the shore. 

Here in the city of Montgomery, where the Confederate States 
were born, and where their President was inaugurated, amid the 
booming of cannon and the shouts of the excited populace — Con- 
federate cannon, before the rising of the morning sun, salute the 
one hundredth anniversary of American Independence. 

And now, if it is permitted by Providence for the spirits of the 
great and good to revisit earth, the scene of their former strifes 
and glories, we may fondly suppose that on this day the spirits of 
our revolutionary fathers are hovering over us. And right here 
in their presence, and in the presence of the Heavenly Host, may 
the God of Nations forgive all our national and individual sins. 

rridulge me one moment longer, fellow-citizens. Imagine that 
some one of us — it may be some bright-eyed boy — could witness 
our next Centennial anniversary, the celebration of the 4th of July, 
1976. AVbat a spectacle would ravish his sight! The beatific 
vision of St. John on the Isle of Patmos was scarcely more enrap- 
turing, than this spectacle would be ! 

If our people be true to the Constitution ; if good will and internal 
peace prevail ; if science continue its giant stride ; if God be our 
God, and we be His people ; judging the future by the past, the 
States composing the American Union will be multiplied to one 
hundred States; the population will he increased from forty to 
four hundred millions; our territory will extend to the Isthmus of 
Panama from the frozen lakes of the North ; railroads, like a net- 
work, will connect all parts of this vast country, and intelligence 
will flash along innumerable telegraph wires from State to State, 
from city to city and from village to village ! The school-house 
and the church will adorn every hill and beautify every valley ! 
And these four hundred millions of people from one hundred free, 
separate, independent, and co-equal States, protected by the same 
Federal Constitution, speaking the same language, worshipping the 
same God, will unite their voices in anthems of praise and ador- 
ation to the Ruler of the Universe, and of gratitude to the patriots 



744 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

of two hundred years ago, for the blessings of American free- 
dom. 

And then, when one hundred stars shall be emblazoned on our 
national flag, these four hundred millions of people may turn, as 
we to-day turn, and apostrophize that flag as the ensign of a great 
Confederate Republic. 

"When Freedom, from her mountain height 

Unfurled her banner to the air, 
She tore the azure robe of Night, 

And set those stars of glory there ! 
Flag of the free heart's only home ! 

By angel hands to valor given ! 
Thy stars have lit the welkin dome, 

And all thy hues were born in Heaven ! 
Forever float that standard sheet ! 

Breathes there a foe who dare oppose us, 
With Freedom's soil beneath our feet, 

And Freedom's banner streaming o'er ua." 



THE NATION'S BIRTHDAY- 

AN ORATION BY HON. GEO. F. TALBOT. 

DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION, AT PORTLAND, ME., 
JULY 4, 1876. 

Fellow-Citizens, — We have arrived at a solemn epoch in our 
country's life. The centuries bring to nations, what the years do 
to individuals, their birthdays. So transient are our single lives, 
so miserably inadequate to the toils and pains and exhausting arts 
by which we acquire wealth, reputation and power, are the fleeting 
years allowed to us for their use and enjoyment, that we can only 
give zest to our activities and dignity to our employments by de- 
voting them to the work of providing a better fortune for our 
families. But the family succumbs sooner or later to the inevi- 
table alternation of death and life, and distributes its envied accu- 
mulations of property, character and genius to men of other name 
and lineage. In contemplating the grand millenniums, which are 
the lifetime of nations, in pouring our rill of thought into the gene- 
ral intelligence, in contributing upright lives to swell the aggregate 
of the public virtue, we forget our petty deaths in the immortality 
of our race, and make our humble employments noble, in that they 
help to make our country greater, and the world more in accord 
with the aspirations of the soul. With minds enlarged by such 
contemplation, we lose our individuality in the deathless career of 
our country. All her history seems to enter into our experience, 
and in her growth and glory, our hopes and sympathies bring to 
us the consciousness of immortality. 

One great goal is reached. A rounded century of nationality 
lies behind us, and a common sentiment summons a great and 
united people to contemplate its history. It naturally divides itself 
into two periods of peril, and one of prosperity. From 1776 to 
1789 we were occupied with the weary war, by which Independ- 



716 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

ence was secured, and with the organization into a harmonious 
political system of the discordant elements that made up our popu- 
lation. Organized into a homogeneous nationality under the 
authority, which the virtue and patriotism of Washington chiefly 
inspired, we entered then upon our halcyon years, which lasted 
down to 1860. Fortunate was the generation of our fathers, whose 
serene lives lay within this favored period. Exempt from the wars 
and revolutions that kept Europe alarmed, crippled its industry, 
arrested its progress, and deciminated its inhabitants, our people 
were left unmolested to mixltiply themselves and attract a migra- 
tion of the bravest and best among the oppressed classes of the 
older world. The wilderness was cleared and cultivated; ships 
were built and sent to gather wealth from the most distant seas ; 
intelligence was diffused, and invention stimulated, by which new 
forces were won from nature, increasing the efficiency, and adding 
to the rewards of human labor. Probably in no country and in no 
period were the best conditions of a happy human existence so 
completely realized, as in the United States during this its early 
golden age. Then broke upon us our final and greater peril, not 
wholly unforeseen by patriotic seers, but not the less on that ac- 
count unprovided for. So potent a demon as slavery could not be 
cast out of the body politic without rending and tearing ; and we 
come up to this our high centennial festival, the wounds of the 
great struggle still bleeding, and grasp each other's hands in an 
honest purpose of reconciliation and repentance, the tears of grief 
and mutual resentment not yet dried in our eyes. 

Going back to the time and place, when the statesmen, whose 
counsel guided and whose courage inspired our fathers, wisely 
rash, resolved upon Independence, we may say : 

" Here was the doom fixed : here is marked the date 
When this New World awoke to man's estate, 
Burnt its last ship and ceased to look behind." 

The American people had taken their fortunes into their own 
hands. They began to recognize the fact that the new continent, 
with its majestic stretch of mountain, forest and plain, bounded 
only by lakes, oceans and tropic seas, had a destiny of its own, 
which it was their duty to develop. 



ORATION — HON. GEORGE F. TALBOT. 717 

The feudal and aristocratic forms of European society seemed 
nowhere capable of transplantation into the soil of the New World. 
Come whence they might, from monarchical England and France 1 , 
from feudal Germany, even from despotic and ecclesiastic Spain, 
the colonists of both North and South America became democ- 
racies at the outset, or lapsed into that condition, as soon as 
foreign constraint was withdrawn. In Virginia, even in New 
England, a few grand families tried to maintain in society a 
prestige, which they could not claim in the State, but their 
liveried servants, their gay apparel, and their stately manners were as 
ludicrously out of place among the homespun settlers, as were the 
chivalric feats and knightly bearing of Don Quixote in the prosaic 
times upon which he fell. Our sickty domestic aristocracies, 
whose monuments are still seen in dilapidated mansions, and heir- 
looms of plate, portraits and brocades, soon perished under the 
necessity, imposing first or last upon all hands, of earning a 
livelihood. 

Metternich said to an American in 183G: " Democracy is natural 
to you ; you have always been a democrat, and democracy is 
therefore a verity in America. In Europe it is a falsehood, and I 
hate all falsehood." So when it fell to our forefathers to establish 
a national government to replace that whose allegiance they had 
disowned, a few theorists believed that we might copy the 
very form of government that had oppressed us, and use the popu- 
larity of Washington to establish a royal line, and the generals and 
statesmen of the revolution as the nucleus of an order of nobility ; 
but to all clear-headed men it was apparent, that we could 
not create a new form of society, but must take .that which 
had come by natural growth. We had always had the Republic in 
free States ; many of whose constitutions survived unchanged down 
to our own times, and a Democracy in the New England town 
meeting. Accordingly the Federal constitution was wisely built 
upon no model of antiquity, no ideal theory, but upon the reality 
of the situation, and with its adoption came a harmonious order in 
our municipal, state and national governments. 

In this inevitable step a wise sagacity shaped the enthusiastic 
politics of our fathers. The instinct of independence had in it the 
promise and potency of out future growth and glory. For from 



748 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

the national independence sprang personal independence, self- 
reliance, the daring to undertake difficult things, that impatience of 
obstacle and restraint, which though sometimes offensively and 
ludicrously exhibited in boasting and vain-glory, lie at the basis of 
all that is effective in the American character. 

The ancient Hebrews, blest in a country of -marvellous fertility, 
a land, in their own poetic language, flowing with milk and honey, 
established the ordinance, that every fiftieth year was a year of 
jubilee. The land was not to be cropped; the slave went free of 
his master ; all mortgaged estates, with the exception of dwelling- 
houses in walled cities (a provision favoring rural life) went back 
without payment to the mortgagor, and every Israelite returned 
from the obligation of servitude, to which poverty or debt had 
subjected him, free to his family and redeemed homestead. It 
was a year of rest to the land, during which, though it was lawful 
to buy of one's neighbor, and to sell to him, no hard bargains and 
no oppression or extortion was permitted. Contented with past 
gains, trustful in the bounties of coming seasons, the people rested, 
and gave thanks ; the rich and the poor feci alike on what nature 
supplied without labor, and on the surplus harvests of the working 
years. 

Our nation's birth-year seems to have fallen upon such a jubilee. 
The slave has gone free of his master. The land, though cul- 
tivated, only fairly repays the labor of tillage. The thousand 
wheels o( our immense manufacturing no longer grow fervid under 
the hot propulsion of gain. Buying and selling go languidly on, 
as though a Centennial generosity to our neighbor had for this 
sabbatical season overborne the national spirit of thrift. We build 
houses and ships, bridges, railways and cities rather in memory of 
the prosperous traffic of years gone by, or in expectation of that 
of years to come, than with any assurance of immediate returns. 

It may be well to apply the brakes to a too headlong material 
progress. Those years of a man's life, when, instead of constant 
accumulation, he finds himself compelled to lose and spend, are 
not his most unfortunate nor least happy years. They bring him 
experience, the wisdom and strength that are acquired in warding 
off or enduring calamities. Doubtless we shall find it good that 
our sabbatical year, our time of retrospection, thanksgiving, and 



ORATION HON. GEORGE F. TALBOT. 749 

high resolving, has fallen upon us, neither occupied upon one 
hand with any great national calamity, like a civil war or an 
invasion, nor on the other hand overdriven with our sordid cares, 
the noise and indecorum of our complicated building and thrift. 
We have invited the world to visit us on our great birth-festival, 
to behold the working for a century of a free government in the 
formation of national character ; and courtesy requires, that we 
come in-doors from our shops and mills, our ship-yards and cattle- 
sheds, put on our coats, and do fit though frank and simple honors 
to our guests. 

But the occasion is too rare and serious to be given wholly 
to etiquette and civility. Whatever may be due to visitors and 
strangers, our principal concern is with ourselves. The solemn 
anniversary, which no eye, that looks upon it intelligently, will 
be likely to see again, brings with it serious thoughts and impera- 
tive duties. It is a time for new devotion to noble purposes. 

In the finished century what have we achieved ? I must 
pass over as unfit for this occasion, and incapable of being com- 
pressed into the limits of this brief discourse, a recapitulation, how- 
over summary, of our progress in population, in breadth of terri- 
torial occupation, in military strength, in overflowing abundance of 
production, in agriculture and manufactures, in education, arts and 
inventions. But 

" What constitutes a State ? 

Not high-raised battlement or labored mound, 
Thick walls or moated gate ; 

Not cities proud, with spires and turrets crowned ; 
Not bays and broad-armed ports, 

Where laughing at the storm, rich navies ride ; 
Not starred and spangled courts, 

Where low-browed baseness wafts perfume to pride. 
No : — men, high-minded men." 

Political institutions are only valuable for the quality of men 
they help to form. What in a hundred years has our trial of 
government given us in the order of men it has produced ? We 
cannot shrink from the investigation. I know how frequent, 
during the disclosures of last year, of corruption in politics and 
fraud in the public service, have been our confessions of degene- 



750 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

racy and decay. Much of this is due to a wholesome quickening 
of the public conscience ; much to the salutary exposure and 
universal discussion of evil jiractiees, which, under more despotic 
governments, and in earlier periods of our own, were decorously 
suppressed to avoid general scandal ; much at last to the small 
economy and scrupulous thrift that belonged rather to the virtue of 
our ancestors. Besides, there is a glamor about the past that hides 
all traits of character in historic men, but those that are luminous 
with heroism. We forget the disreputable intrigues among the 
generals and patriots of the revolution to undermine the influence 
of Washington, and to take from him the chief command. We 
sigli for the devotion, fidelity and integrity that characterized the 
times of Jefferson and Madison, and have forgotten the partisan 
animosities which alienated citizens, and embittered all the inter- 
course of political, professional and social life. Men compete with 
each other now, as in- the last century, as in all centuries, for 
the goods of life, for wealth, lucrative employments and honorable 
stations, rather with less than greater rancor and unfairness. The 
usages of civil life always tend to enlarge our respect for the 
rights of other men ; and we learn justice, which is the law 
of affairs, as we learn courtesy, which is the law of society, by 
use. Neither the virtues nor the vices of any age are like 
the virtues or vices of another age ; and if the weakness of 
the public virtue has exhibited itself of late in the direction of 
the greed of gain, it is due to the deranged standards of value, one 
of the calamities of a great war ; to the increased difficulties of 
obtaining subsistence, intensifying the struggle for life; and to the' 
sudden access of luxury among classes enriched by the unfair 
distributions of gains, only jjossible under commercial disorders. 

But I do not wish to say a single word to assuage the keenness 
of the popular conscience, which must be left by the overwhelming 
shame of a palpable evil to work out our repentance and deliver- 
ance. Metternich once said to George Ticknor, speaking of the 
tendencies of monarchies and republics ; " I labor chieflv, almost 
entirely, to prevent evils. In a democracy you cannot do this ; 
there you must begin by the evil, and endure it till it has been 
felt and acknowledged, and then, perhaps, you can apply the 
remedy." Mr. Ticknor himself afterwards acknowledged this re- 



ORATION — HON. GEORGE P. TALBOT. 7.J1 

proach of democratic institutions entirely just. " We must," he 
said, " first suffer from an evil before we can apply the remedy. 
We have no preventive legislation upon such subjects. But then, 
on the other hand, when the people do come to the rescue, they 
come with a flooding force, which your societies, where power is 
balanced between the government and the masses, know nothing 
about." 

We are slow to provide against anticipated and problematical 
evils, however threatening they may seem to dispassionate ob- 
servers. We permitted, even cherished slavery, while philanthro- 
pists and publicists among ourselves and in foreign Stairs, gave 
eloquent warning of its destructive tendencies. But when it armed 
itself in rebellion against the Union, and demanded half our terri- 
tory, as a theatre upon which to put to the test its plan of a gov- 
ernment built upon a dominant and subject race, the people rose 
in their might, and crushed the evil thing with a thoroughness that 
brooked neither palliation nor delay. So we have failed to agree 
upon any remedy for a corrupt civil service, and the degradation 
of the public patronage to the uses of self seeking men, until the 
general offence has become so rank, that the popular will is fast 
ripening to the determination to obliterate the shame and scandal 
in the same resolute and thorough way. 

Above the shame that a few mean and mercenary men, intruding 
audaciously into public stations, to which neither their characters, 
abilities or public services entitled them, have been able to inflict 
upon their country, the great honest heart of the people is as patri- 
otic, as ready to sacrifice to the public weal, as prompt to accord 
to other men, of whatever condition, lineage or creed, the complete 
measures of their just rights, as it was in the early days of the 
Republic. 

A great duty devolved upon us, as the freest people on the 
globe, who had made the free common school the basis of its po- 
litical system, and who had jealously resented any interference 
with the utter freedom of the press, the pen and the tongue, in the 
way of the development for the rest of mankind and in the interest 
of an expanding civilization, of the science of government and of 
society. We have scarcely met the world's just expectation. The 
political discussions in foreign reviews and in the English ami 



752 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

French legislative assemblies are more thorough and scientific than 
those by American writers and legislators. No author among us, 
during the century, has written with the comprehension, the philo- 
sophic spirit, the authority with which Paine and Jefferson and 
the authors of the Federalist wrote in the very beginning of the 
epoch. Our standard works upon all questions pertaining to the 
civil and social state, are those of thinkers whose studies were pur- 
sued under the shadow of monarchical and aristocratic institutions. 
With perfect liberty to test in practice every theory, as a people we 
are still at odds with these fundamental questions of national policy. 
What is the soundest circulating medium — that under which prop- 
erty is best acquired, secured and distributed ? Are the industrial 
interests of a people best promoted by giving bounties to particular 
branches of production, or by leaving trade as nearly as possible 
free ? Upon what principle should government employments be 
distributed ? What functions for which the whole community 
have an interest, and which require, to be well done, a combination 
of capital and labor, like carrying the mails, sending telegrams, 
building railroads, common roads and canals, transportation of 
persons and property, can with economy and expediency be under- 
taken by the State ? What degree of intellectual, moral and re- 
ligious education ought government to provide and enforce for the 
whole people ? How far may the control of majorities and the 
absoluteness of democracy be restrained by constitutions and irre- 
pealable laws? To what extent is the territory of the United 
States an asylum for all races, colors and creeds ; and, having upon 
us the task of building a consolidated nation to be the pioneer of 
the world in its career of progress — to what extent may we select 
the materials out of which we will build ? 

The century closes with none of these questions settled for our- 
selves, or for other peoples waiting for the sanction of our exam- 
ple, we may say without our having earnestly entered upon their 
consideration. This is due partly to that illogical character we 
inherit from our English ancestry, which will oblige us to settle 
them one by one as they become urgent, practically and not scien- 
tifically, and perhaps some of them in flat contradiction of the very 
theories to which we are pledged. It is due still more to that 
wretched necessity of our politics which forbids us to consider any 



ORATION — HON. GEORGE F. TALBOT. 753 

question upon its merits, and drives us to the calculation of how 
we are to carry the next election. We are free traders for every- 
thing but the cotton, coal or lumber in which we or our section 
are embarked. We believe in the equality of man, with a saving 
clause for the Pacific slope of the Mongol, for the South of the 
negro, and for the rest of us, of whatever type of poverty, ignor- 
ance or helotage intrudes upon our pride of race. 

But if our political literature has disappointed mankind ; if we 
have developed no theory of democracy for the struggling peoples 
of Europe to study, we have done wbat is infinitely better and 
more effective — we have offered an example of a Republic pros- 
perously conducted through the perils of a century under laws 
wisely framed and loyally obeyed by its citizens, wherein — 
always excepting the shame and wickedness of that slavery we 
have repented and put away — life and liberty have been safe, and 
crime and vice have been restrained, freedom of thought and speech 
has been maintained, education, intelligence, and property have 
been as equally diffused as the natural capacities of men ever per- 
mit, and the most favorable conditions of human life have been 
secured to the mass of the people. It is difficult to over-estimate 
the power of such an example. In every aspiration for a better 
civic and social condition, our constitution has been the ideal that 
gave body to that aspiration ; our striped and starry flag has led 
the nations through the bloody agonies of revolution as the pillar 
of cloud and flame led the ancient Israelites towards the promised 
land. Especially since our late great peril and deliverance, the 
recuperative energy of the Republic, as shown in the gigantic 
military strength it suddenly developed ; its capacity to respond 
to the noblest sentiments of duty and justice, as shown by the 
heroic spirit, patience and sacrifices of its citizens, have given us 
an access of influence which neither the sanction of long custom, 
nor vague terrors of disrupted society, nor a police 1 tacked by a 
standing army, have been able to counteract. 

What changes we have made in the constitution of the govern- 
ment, have all been in the direction of an increased democracy, 
and a larger participation of the people in practical administration. 
The discretion theoretically given to the Electoral College to de- 
liberate, and from their superior judgment, select the fitting persons 



754 OUIl NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

to be President and Vice-President, has long since given place to 
the mere automatic registration of the popular choice, which might 
just as well be made directly. Popular election of judges for 
short terms has taken the place of executive appointment during 
good behavior. The tenure of all offices has been shortened, and 
the conduct of legislatures, magistrates, and courts has been 
brought under the popular criticism and control. Judges must at 
their peril find some way to reconcile the science of law to the 
prevalent tendencies of the times ; and law-makers, when they can 
no longer compromise, postpone or refer back, must make political 
economy accommodate itself to the present wishes and interests of 
the masses. 

From this tendency to refer everything back to the people has 
resulted the necessity of taking into the popular arena the most 
complicated and abstruse questions, such as those of finance, and 
of protection and free trade. More and more our election cam- 
paigns become scientific discussions, and more and more they are 
and ought to be stripped of their degrading features of flattery, 
insincerity, and personality. 

" Since the people are our rulers, our safety lies," as Mr. Lowe 
sarcastically said in advocating the English Education bill, " in 
educating our rulers." How can we better consecrate this day in 
the heart of every patriotic citizen and make it religious in as high 
a sense as the President intended in his message, than by pledging 
om^selves to the generous support of whatever educates the people. 
Let the schools be free, and untrammelled by sectarian control. 
Let us enlarge the influence of the pulpit and the platform, and 
demand that none shall teach from either who do not exemplify in 
their own lives the validity of what they teach. Let literature 
and art, sedulously cultivated, and liberally paid, diffuse among 
men and women that culture which shall take from us as a people 
the reproach of shallowness and vulgarity. Finally, let us remem- 
ber that the education of affairs is far more efficient and salutary, 
than the formal education of schools. 

The newspaper, the telegraph, and the mail, make our modern 
life wonderfully conspicuous. The time prophesied of has come, 
when what has been told in the ear is proclaimed upon the house- 
top. How terrible is the popular reproach of a great public fraud, 



ORATION — HON. G-EORGE F. TALBOT. 755 

of a heartless extortion, or a cruel crime ! How exhilarating is 
a nation's applause at a brave act, a heroic sacrifice, the enuncia- 
tion of a grand thought ! Let us keep our plaudits only for the 
best, and dismiss with compliments only those faithful servants 
that have done good service to the State Monarchies like those 
of Britain and Prussia have been able to perpetuate themselves 
and secure, in the freedom, intelligence, and prosperity of their 
people, the true ends of government, by making it an inviolable 
maxim of state to put the best and ablest men in stations of au- 
thority, and the elective franchise in a Republic, though universal, 
is a snare and a delusion, unless through it the people may enjoy 
their dearest right to be represented by their best and wisest men. 
The first century closes behind us. Lotus enter upon the second 
with thankfulness for all that we have achieved, and with a deter- 
mination to make our country worthier than ever of our highest 
love aud holiest devotion. 



CENTENNIAL OEATION. 

AN ORATION BY HON I. C. PAI1KRR. 

DKLIVEKED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEURATION, AT FORT SMITH, 
ARKANSAS, JULY 4th, 1870. 

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen. — It was just about 
this hour one hundred years ago that the Fathers proclaimed the 
Declaration of American freedom. What a grand sight it is to 
see forty millions of people shouting at this hour. All hail, mighty 
day ! All hail to the sister States as they stand with joined hands 
around our country's altar, placing thereon the oblations of their 
faith in the government of our common country. Let us, one and 
all, say forever, all hail, United States of America ! 

Need I tell you that when yonder sun sinks to rest behind the 
golden ribbed mountains of our Pacific coast there will have closed 
the grandest cycle of years in the history of the world ? Need I 
remind you that the experiment in behalf of the rights of man of 
one hundred years ago is to-day, by the whole world, recognized as 
the greatest achievement of history ? That the work of the fathers 
in bringing into existence a great government, and the work of 
their children in preserving and perpetuating the principles of 
right, upon which the same is founded is now by the whole world 
eulogized in the unmatched eloquence of a grand achievement. 
Why, at this very hour the poet and the painter, the mechanic and 
the artizan of the civilized world have placed at the very base of 
the altar of liberty the fruits of their genius and the productions of 
their skill as peace-offerings, in recognition of the full fruition of 
the hopes of those who were the founders of the Republic. To- 
day the sovereign and the subject, the lord and the peasant of the 
old world stand beneath the very roof tree of the temple of liberty, 
and recognize the principle of American freedom and American 
equality. As to those whose deeds we this day celebrate, whose 



OKATION — HON. I. C. 1'AIiKER. 757 

achievements we here and now commemorate, the world will little 
note, nor long remember the feeble utterances we this day may 
make in their praise, but their fame will be as enduring as the 
great principles they exemplified by their deeds, and by their 
efforts brought into active existence. Everything in science, art 
and nature will be ever tributary to their expanding renown. 

" The winds shall murmur of their names, 
The woods be peopled with their fame; 
The meanest rill, the mightiest river, 
Roll mingling with their fame forever." 

We read that after the children of Israel had escaped from the 
most galling bondage in Egypt, and after the Lord of hosts had 
triumphed gloriously over those who despised the sentiment " that 
all men are created free and equal," and the horse and rider had 
been thrown into the sea, and after right had prevailed over might 
in the very morning of the world, and those who had escaped from 
the thraldom of the Egyptian task-masters had sung their sono-s of 
joy on the banks of their deliverance, the great, law-giver Moses 
received from the Deity, not only that higher law upon which is 
based the Christian's faith, but also that code which all civilized 
nations have directly, or indirectly recognized as the one by which 
the world can be governed. It was then that the command which 
I have read to you, came pure and spotless from the mouth of God 
himself, when he spoke to Moses from amidst the fire and smoke 
and awful thunders of Sinai, commanding him to " hallow the 
fiftieth year and proclaim liberty throughout all the laud, and unto 
all the inhabitants thereof." 

We in this age of the world fully recognize the fact that the 
principle of this command has its seat and center in the mind of the 
Deity, and its mission is the harmony of the universe, and because it 
became known of men as being the will of God, you and I, together 
with the people of this whole land, in obedience to what has 
become a time honored custom, not only here, but wherever may 
be found Americans, and wherever floats the flag of the free, and 
also in obedience to a sense of patriotic duty, quit the field and the 
anvil, the workshop and the counter, the busy marts of commerce 
and the flaming forge, the noise and bustle and heat of the city, as 



758 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

we'll as the quiet of the country home, to assemble around the altars 
of American liberty, and place thereon the oblations of our faith in 
" a government of the people, by the people and for the people," 
pledging our troth anew to those eternal rights of man proclaimed 
by the fathers, when they one hundred years ago to-day hurled in 
the, very face of despotism the immortal declaration. 

He who does not recognize the finger of God in this work, must 
most certainly be forgetful of the fact that he alone holds in the 
hollow of his hand the destiny of nations ; marking out and con- 
trolling that destiny with the same unerring certainty with which 
the Star of Bethlehem guided the wise men of the East to the 
lowly cradle of Him who became as man, that the children might 
be free. 

It can truly be said that it is well for us, upon the annual return 
of this, our National Anniversary, to hang our banner on the outer 
wall, to forget all political differences for the time being ; sink the 
partizan in the patriot, and join hands around our country's altar, 
Here we can ponder over the trials and sacrifices endured by the 
officers and soldiers of the Continental army who achieved our 
Independence. We can reflect over the terrible dangers which 
were incurred by the brave, and good men who framed and 
adopted the Declaration of Independence which brought forth upon 
this Continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to 
the idea that all men are created equal. 

Since the treaty of peace between the Colonies and England, 
the limits of the Republic have been enlarged and fixed by the 
treaties of cession in 1803 with Napoleon, as first Consul of the 
French Republic; that of 1810 with Spain ; by the admission in 
1846 of Texas; by the treaty of limits of that year with Great 
Britain, fixing the dividing line between the Territory of Oregou 
and the British Possessions; by the treaties of 1818 and 1853, 
with Mexico, and the treaty of 1857 with Alexander II, the 
Emperor of all the Russias. By these treaties or cession the 
area of the United States of America has been increased to eight 
times its original extent, covering nearly 1,000,000 of square miles 
of territory. 

The watchword of the people of the older States, and of the old 
world, was, 



ORATION — HON. I. C. PAKKER. 759 

"To the west, to the west, the land of the free, 

Where our mighty rivers roll down to the sea; 
Where a man is a man, if but willing to toil, 

Where lie is a freeman, if willing to gather the fruits of the soil." 

No era of the history of the world presents such evidenees of the 
march of empire ; of the material development of a country, and 
the intellectual, social and moral advancement of its people, us 
does ours. Truly we have :i history that .is the very miracle of 
history. Into our young life, one hundred years long, are crowded 
a constellation of epochs enough to make resplendent with glory 
whole centuries of common years. From thirteen States repre- 
sented by thirteen stars upon our banner, we have increased until 
the constellation representing the grand sisterhood of States 
covers the whole of the Ileaveu-lit blue of that flag. The colonies 
were weak, and they were looked upon with contempt by the des- 
potism of Europe. 

In the success of our fathers, they saw the success of the people, 
and they knew right well that that success meant their ultimate 
downfall. But how the scene has changed; there is not a power 
on earth that does not to-day court the favor of the Government 
of the United States. We are now known and honored throughout 
the world. There was a time in the history of Rome, when to say 
" I am a Roman citizen," insured personal liberty and protection 
throughout the then civilized world ; but he who can now say " I 
am an American citizen," finds in that sentence a magic power 
which will protect him all around the globe. Truly we can now 
say, 

" Where breathes the foe but falls before us, 
With freedom's soil beneath our feet and freedom's banner 
streaming o'er us. 

It is useless for me to dwell upon our progress as a nation, 
because it is written upon every page of our history ; it is manifest 
in everything we see around us. The confines of civilization has 
step by step moved westward, crossing great rivers and vast prairies 
and plains, and dense forests, and ascending mighty mountains 
until it planted the church and school-house, the warp and woof of 
our American Union, upon the golden sands of the Pacific slope 3 



760 OUK NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

and sent our messengers of commerce, spreading their white wings- 
on old ocean's bosom bearing our civilization far away to Asia, 
telling the people of that land that there is a land beyond the sea, 
where every man is free. 

Fifty years ago there was not a railroad in the United States. 
Now we have more than seventy thousand miles. Now these 
arteries of commerce penetrate the whole body of the nation, bind- 
ing it together more closely with bands of iron. Thirty-three 
years ago there was not a telegraph line in the United States. 
But the little thread of wire placed as a timid experiment between 
Washington City and Baltimore grew and lengthened and multi- 
plied with almost the rapidity of the electric current that darted 
along its iron nerves, until within our lifetime, continent has been 
bound unto continent, hemisphere answers through ocean's depths 
unto hemisphere. Yea, since that time we have spanned old ocean 
and girdled the whole earth with the tamed lightnings of heaven, 
thus bringing all nations together, and more directly under the 
influence of that power which is the grand seat of libert}', the 
United States of America, and teaching all nations that sentiment 
in which we believe, which was contained in the declaration thun- 
dered forth from amidst Mar's hill by Paul, when he said, " of 
one blood are all nations created to dwell on the face of the earth 
forever." Great cities have sprung up everywhere over this 
bright and beautiful land. Prosperous villages are now dotted 
over it like the stars in the heavens. Its valleys and mountain 
slopes are covered with the homes of freemen. Now 

"Toil swings the ax, and forests bow, 
The fields break out in radiant bloom. 

Rich harvests smile behind the plow, 
And cities cluster round the loom." 

"We have had our troubles as a nation. Our domestic war 
passed over this fair land, leaving its mark on each brow, its 
shadow in each household. But, thank God, that is over now. 
Sweet peace blesses the whole land, and slavery, the cause of the 
war, is no more a part of the system. Whatever may have been 
our opinions in the past, we all breathe fre^and rejoice that it is 
gone. Yes, we now, one and all, gladly shout forth the grand 



ORATION — HON. I. C. PARKER. 70 J 

sentiment, " there treads not a slave on the soil of free America."' 
We could not help it. It came to us as one of the defects of our 
system. Now, every man, woman and child is raised to the dig- 
nity of an American freeman, and we all, from the Kennebec to the 
Rio Grande, from the Santee to the far. off Oregon rejoice that it 
is so. Yes, we rejoice that yonder banner, from the time that it 
greets the morning sunlight until it kisses the last rays of the set- 
ting sun, protects all alike ; that it is the symbol of liberty, the 
shield and protection of American citizenship. That bright, tri- 
umphant banner of liberty now floats proudly over every foot of 
American soil. 

The perpetuity of our institutions, if we are true to our ancestry, 
to ourselves and to posterity, is forever established. Our great 
rivers, in all their long, majestic course to the sea, will pass through 
but one country. Our ocean bounds will be but the boundaries of 
one nation. We are truly one people, one nation, with one gov- 
ernment, one system of laws, one and the same country, bound 
together by a common interest, a common ancestry, and united, as 
I trust we are to be, when the scars of the war shall have entirely 
healed, by the silver cords of love and affection for each other. 
We worship the same God, according to the dictates of our own 
conscience. We ought to be all seeking the one common end — 
the happiness of our people, and the greatness and glory of our 
land. The down-trodden of every race have an interest in us. 
The oppressed of Ireland look upon our flag as they see it stream- 
ing from the masthead of some merchantman in their harbors 
across the sea, and sigh for a home in the bright land of hope that 
sends forth that banner. The oppressed of England, looking upon 
it, remember the pilgrim fathers flying from English tyranny to 
plant that banner beyond blue ocean's wintry waves, and wish the 
liberty that banner guarantees may be theirs too. The Italian 
refugee hails it in a foreign port, and breathes a prayer that the 
flag of Italy may sometime insure to Italians that liberty which 
the flag of America guarantees to Americans. 

The liberty-loving German, loving liberty for himself, and all 
the world besides, now points to our banner as the fulfilment of 
his prophecy, that those who fight for liberty will win the battle. 
The poor Frenchman, when he looks around him and beholds the 



762 OUIl NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

ruin and desolation of his fair vine-clad France, rained by that des- 
potism which has hurled its course upon the people from a French 
throne, remembers Lafayette, looks upon our banner and hopes 
his France will yet be free. The lovers of liberty in Spain point 
to our banner, and shout for a government like ours. 

And the people of Canada, and of Cuba — the queen of the 
Antilles, standing away out among the dashing waxes of the 
Atlantic, and San Domingo and all the Islands on the American 
Contii cut, are even now wishing for the time when they can call 
our flag their own. And who shall hinder them? Who shall 
stand in the way of the march of our' manifest destiny ? 'Who 
shall be so unreasonable as to say to these countries and these 
islands which are even now trembling within the grasp of monarchs 
or being crushed out by the heel of despotism, you shall not be- 
come a part of us ? I trust none. 

One hundred long years have passed since the war of indepen- 
dence in this land waged for the rights of freemen, burst upon the 
country, and that one hundred years are crowded full of the most 
glorious memories of a national life, and the most touching, sweet- 
est and saddest memories that our hearts cherish. The patriot 
fathers are gathered to their long homes. We kneel by their 
graves and utter a prayer for their spirits fled. We honor their 
deeds ; we worship their memories. We plant above their graves 
the willow and the laurel, and we feel that blood like this 
"For liberty shed so lioly is 

It would not stain the purest rill 
That sparkles among the bowers of bliss. 

Oli ! if there be on this earthly sphere 
A boon, an offering Heaven holds dear, 

'Tis the last libation liberty draws 
From the heart that bleeds and breaks in her cause." 

We as citizens of this Republic must not forget that we have 
duties to perform — solemn, high, imperative duties. We must 
bear in mind that eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. We 
must remain as faithful sentinels on the watch tower of freedom 
guarding well the portals of liberty, ever bearing in mind that 

"Freedom's battle once begun, 

Bequeathed by bleeding sire to son, 
Though baffled oft, is ever won." 



ORATION HON. I. C. PARKER. 7G3 

Soon, very soon, we of this generation will lie gathered to the 
graves of our fathers. Why, there is not one of us here to-day 
who in the course of nature will be here one hundred years hence. 
The voices thai, now shout the praises of those who gave us this 
noble heritage will be stilled in death. The hearts that beat with 
pulsations of pride and patriotic emotion, will he silent, forever. 
Let us, while we are here, do our duty as well as (hose in the past 
did theirs. Let us keep manned with a brave and patriotic crew 
the ship of State, so that when we shall turn it over to another 
crew there will not be a [dank, a sail, a rope, or spar out. of place, 
and the grand old pennon of liberty will be streaming lull high at 
the masthead. That the generations to come after us as they see 
her moored in the haven of safety, freighted with the dearest 
yights of man, will greet her with 

" We know what master laid thy keel, 
What workman wrought thy ribs of steel, 
Who made each mast and sail ami rope, 
What anvils rang, what hammers beat, 
In what a forge, in what a heat, 
Were shaped the anchors of thy hope." 

There are even yet dangers which beset our national pathway. 
They can only be avoided by a correct and faithful performance of 
our duty ; by vigilant and watchful care on the part of all good 
citizens. Then let us retire from the celebration of this, our one 
hundredth national birthday with renewed faith in our institutions ; 
with still stronger convictions in favor of the capacity of man for 
self-government, with a linn determination, and a high and noble 
resolve on our part that let come what will, that wc will ever 
remain faithful guardians of institutions and laws which protect all 
alike; which secure liberty to all, no matter whether it, he the 
opulent and powerful, or the poor and lowly. That the mailed 
hand of power, wielded by the whole American people, will ever 
protect the government of our common country, and preserve for 
all coming time our free institutions. 

Let us resolve to hasten that day when the nations "shall learn 
war no more;" when the battle flags shall be furled ; when the 
sword shall be beaten into the scythe, and the cannon shall become 



7G4 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

the plowshare ; when the universal brotherhood of man shall be 
proclaimed and recognized everywhere ; when peace on earth and 
goodwill to men shall be the watchword among the nations ; when 

"All crime shall cease and ancient fraud shall fail, 
Returning justice lift aloft her scale, 
Peace o'er the world her olive wand extend, 
And white robed innocence from heaven descend." 

Then let us, as good citizens and patriots, so perform our part, 
that when we have passed from the stage of action, and the mystic 
chord of memory shall bring the minds of our posterity back to 
this period, and to the time when our lathers laid broad and deep 
the foundations of our free institutions, they can say that we pre- 
served and transmitted to them untarnished and uncorrupted what 
the fathers gave to us, so that they can with the same emotion, 
the same truth, the same patriotic pride, and the same devotion 
say, as we can this day before high Heaven exclaim, 

Great God, we thank Thee for this home — 

This bounteous birth-land of the free; 
Where wanderers from afar may come 

And breathe the air of liberty. 
Still may her flowers untramelled spring, 

Her harvest wave, her cities rise ; 
And yet, till time shall fold his wing, 

Remain earth's loveliest paradise. 



GOD'S PROVIDENCES AND OUR DUTY. 

BY REV. ROBT. COLLYER, D. D. 

A TALK TO THE CITIZENS OF LA CROSSE, WIS., JULY 4TH, 187G. 

Ladies and Gentlemen. — When I got to La Crosse and en- 
quired about the order of proceedings, and found the Declaration 
of Independence had to be read before I made my speech, I tried 
to alter the thing so that it should be read after ; because I knew 
when that document was drawn out I should have to suffer. I am 
an Englishman. That man Thomas Jefferson handled so roughly 
was my great grandfather's king. And there is a tradition in the 
Colly er family that my great grandfather fought in the Revolution- 
ary war, but then he fought on the other side. So you see where 
I am. T look on this great crowd of faces and think I see a good 
deal of good feeling, and tenderness and kindness ; and I want 
you just to think how I have been suffering while our friend read the 
document. Every blow fell on my shoulders, and now after having 
all this to bear, I must make a speech about a matter in which by 
birth and tradition, my family and myself are all on the wrong 
side. 

Then I have to remember another thing. That all over these 
United States to-day where men and women gather to hear this 
paper read — the noblest declaration of human rights ever made to 
the world — only one of two men can say just the right word after 
it. If in this great assembly this morning there stands a man who 
has descended from the pure and noble blood of the fathers who 
fought in the Revolutionary war on the right side, he himself hav- 
ing a good, square, honest, manful personal history, that man might 
speak to you and you might hear him to a grand purpose. Or 
again, I saw a man on the train yesterday afternoon who could 
have made a nobler speech than I can or any man in my position. 
ITe was evidently a soldier, he was thin and worn, his face told a 



7GG OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

story of sickness and suffering, and one of his sleeves was empty. 
That was the man to talk to you, or my brother who has just now 
prayed for us and who told me, with no idea that I would repeat 
his story, how he went out in the great quarrel which has filled the 
latter pages of our national history, not as a chaplain to go to the 
rear when the tight came on, hut as a common soldier to carry his 
musket and take his chances.* These are the men who should talk 
to i.s to-day. 

You remember in the old Roman history a story of a great day 
when a man was needed to stir the common heart. One man after 
another got up and made his speech, but the heart was not stirred ; 
until an old man came forward and held up the stump that was left 
of a hand that had been shorn off in battle for Rome. He said no 
word— that was the speech — the common heart responded to it and 
the day was won. Ladies and Gentlemen, this is the true secret 
of power to-day. The men who not only said they were ready to 
give their life, their wealth, and their sacred honor for the great 
cause, but who gave all they had, in a grand enthusiasm for the 
great cause, these are the men who should talk to us to-day. 

But I am here to say some word to you fit for the time, and I 
can do no better than begin by saying that, while I can claim no 
such fitness as this I have tried to touch, I trust I can claim a cer- 
tain fitness in being as I have been for six and twenty years, 
thoroughly identified with this nation, as well as a member of the 
great family from which so many of you that hear me this morning 
are descended. And while your Declaration of Independence is 
true, every word of it, and that old King ought to be entirely 
ashamed of himself every time he thinks about his part in it, wher- 
ever lie has gone, this is true also. That there was in those old 
times of the struggle for a national existence in this country what 
you shall also find to this day, a great body of noble men in my 
mother country who have stood shoulder to shoulder with the Amer- 
ican nation. Men who, before the struggle broke out into blood- 
shed, said that is right, you must fight for your Independence if 
you have to, or you will be enslaved. Who, during the darkest 
days of the Revolution sent great words of cheer to you, and have 

*The Rev. Mr. C'lough, pastor in charge <>( the Methodist Church, and a 
capital fellow. 



ORATION — REV. ROBERT COLLIER, D.D. 7f>7 

to this day stea'dily maintained that the grandest stroke in the 
world's history was this your fathers made a hundred years a^o. 
There can be no two minds about this, any more than there can be 
any room for doubt that the noble old nation I am still so proud of 
respects you more deeply and loves you more tenderly to-day he- 
cause you gave her such a trouncing. I say this with a sure confi- 
dence that I am right, because the struggle was carried on between 
the members of a family which has always hail the finest possible 
faculty after they had fought a thing out of getting oyer it, shak- 
ing hands and saying no more about it. The men of our blood are 
not given to ripping up old grudges. If we bury our trouble we 
don't put a stone there so as to be able to dig it out whenever we 
want to. The white rose and the red came to a death grapple in 
the old days, when the strongest stood and the weakest went down. 
And in the great Rebellion, as they used to call the grandsire of 
your revolution, the Puritan on the one side, and the Cavalier on 
the other, had to fight it out again to the bitter end. But when 
the fight was over the white rose and the red grew together about 
the cottage and the hall, and the Cavalier and Puritan sat at the 
same fireside. Now we have to remember also that in our last 
strife our old mother country, of which we are so proud, didn't 
behave herself at all as she ought to, still, we have to see that since 
the strife ended she has done very well indeed. For in the pay- 
ment of that great bill of damages we notice this very important 
truth, that it is the first bill of the kind England has ever paid. 
Always before this she would first of all have her own way with a 
nation, then, if they did not like that she would thrash them if she 
could, and then, when she was through if there was half a chance 
she would make them foot the bills. She has not done that this 
time and I will tell you why. It is because she feels we are men 
of her own blood and bleeding and that there has grown up on this 
side the Atlantic a grand strong nationality she cannot compel to 
anything it has not a mind to do. Then she recognizes this truth 
also. That the Union of Great Britain and America in everything 
noble and good is the very best wedding which can take place in the 
human family. She feels as I trust we do, that to be of one heart 
and one mind now, for the commonwealth of humanity, is to give 
the world a new hope ; and so it is a good thing to shake hands all 



768 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

round and think of each other with a great tender pride on such a 
day as this. The same old home held theirs and ours once, and 
blood is thicker than water. 

Then three things are to be thought of to-day as our stake in 
such a destiny. That this new world is a grand theatre for a great 
purpose ; has been made already the home of a great providence ; 
and is by consequence the field for our most faithful endeavor. 

We have within our own borders, it is said, three millions of 
square miles of land without a parallel anywhere in the world, 
coal fields twenty times greater than those of Europe, minerals of 
other kinds beyond all estimate, a climate which includes the finest 
virtues of all the zones, and about everything besides the heart can 
wish of this material wealth — and that is our estate. 

Then see how it was given to us. There can be no doubt that 
•ar country was found and lost again more than once before it was 
finally lifted into the sun that all the world might see it. The north- 
men found it a thousand years ago, but the time had not come to use 
the land for a fine true purpose, and so it fell back again below the 
far sea line. The truth seems to be that the right man was not 
ready to come over and settle down and start a new life. It was 
nearly 600 years too soon. This new world must come to the 
front in God's good time. She had to wait for the printing press 
and the open bible, and for gunpowder to start the vassal on equal 
terms with the prince, and make steel armor of no more use than 
buckram against a good eye and a steady hand. I think this is 
why our new world was hidden away until the true time came for 
its revelation. Right where we are standing, shooting out from 
here in all directions and covering I trust our whole estate, there 
was a predestination and election, a power above, which set these 
things in order and brought them to pass in its own full time. 

And when the time came for our separation from the mother 
country, we are touched again by this mystery of a Providence 
watching over us and working for us before the fathers took hold 
in good earnest to settle the question through their own manhood. 
I have read somewhere that when the king was crowned the choic- 
est jewel in the diadem fell out, and the people said it was an omen 
of some great disaster and the time showed the truth of the 
sign. While that king was still a young man, the fairest jewel 



ORATION — REV. ROBERT COLLYER, D.D. 769 

was lost to the English Crown. "When Washington was a lad his 
mother thought she would like him to be a midshipman in the 
English navy, but her heart failed her and she could not let him 
go. You wanted "Washington and he had to stay at home. He 
Avas in an ice pack in fifteen feet of water in the Alleghany river 
and a thousand to one he had gone under and been lost ! he could 
not be lost, he was wanted down here, he had to get out of that 
and go home again. The Indian turned and fired on him at short 
range, there was grim death in that shot, but it missed the mark. 
You ask me why ? I ask you why Wesley was not burnt up in the 
parsonage or Cromwell slain at Marston Moor, or Mohammed 
found in the cave or Paul sent out of the world in his freshman 
year. Some lives grow to be so sacred as we watch them through 
the glass of history, that we say it is impossible they can end be- 
fore the man has done his work. And so Washington could not 
be drowned, or die of the small-pox in Barbadoes, or be shot 
by the Indian at short range, or be hustled out of the world in anv 
other way we can think of. He had to grow to be a noble leader 
of the race, the saviour beyond all other men of this country in 
her great strife for freedom, and the man to whom we look up to- 
day with a deep sweet reverence, we feel for no other man of our 
nation except our great good martyr, President Abraham Lincoln. 
But manifest destiny, fellow-citizens, must be the spur to manifest 
duty, or it is no good to any man or any nation to believe in it. 
And so it would be worse than useless for me to come here to-day 
and talk to you in this strain about the old time, while we all for- 
get the new time in which we are living. The procession, the 
flags, the music and the cheers are all well enough, but how about 
the place each man of us holds in this land which was won by the 
brave blood of the fathers and the guardianship of God. 

Mr. Smiles tells a story of a man in the last century who under- 
took to make a steam engine. He made what seemed to be a very 
capital engine indeed. The lever lifted to a charm, the piston an- 
swered exactly, the wheels worked beautifully, nothing could be 
better, but when it came to be fairly tried there was one drawback ; 
it would just go and that was all. On its own hook it would work 
beautifully — go through its own motions perfectly, but when you 
wanted it to lift a pound beside, then lever and piston and wheels 



770 OtJR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

struck work, and as it was made in an age and country in which 
to do nothing was to be counted a gentleman, they baptized the 
thing Evans' gentlemanly engine. Now who has not seen num- 
bers of men whose action resembles that gentlemanly engine ? 
What little they do, they do for themselves. You can find no 
fault so far with their motion, and they are polished sometimes to 
perfection, especially those parts that are brass or steel, but they 
would not raise a blister on their hands to save their souls — at least 
they don't. Their one motto is to take care of number one, as they 
say, and in taking care of number one in this light and gentlemanly 
fashion, they generally come either to depend on the old man 
every time they get into a tight place, or on their friends, until 
they are sick of the sight of them, as they drift down at last to 
the poor house or the jail, or they may go lower still. They may 
go down and down, until they go down to Washington to hunt for 
an office they know they cannot fill, and draw money for it they 
know they don't earn — the very meanest thing, as I think, that an 
American citizen can do. 

Now this is the first trouble we can touch in our nation to-day, 
that men, so very many men, should do nothing in particular, or 
come as near as they ean to this idea of a gentleman by shirking 
every thing which is not easy and light. The question what makes 
a gentleman is not an easy one to answer, but I say that between 
such a man as this and a good blacksmith or woodchopper, or any 
other honest fellow who puts all the manhood there is in him into 
his day's work, there can be no sort of comparison. Your hard 
handed mechanic is beyond all question the truer gentleman as 
well as the better man, and in the good time coming everybody will 
say so who has a right to be anybody. Honest work well done 
is the first thing, I say. But that does not mean merely to work 
hard, because I take it to be more essential to work honestly than 
it is to work hard at any thing. I had a shopmate, when I was 
a lad, who was as good a blacksmith when he did his best as any 
man I ever saw stand at an anvil, but it seems to me now he was 
the most ingenious scamp at getting up any sort of a lie in iron I 
ever saw with a hammer in his hand. Now a man like that may 
work hard, you see ; but on the whole the harder he works the 
worse it is, because he just works hard at lying. It is no matter 



ORATION — REV. ROfeERT COLT.YER, D.t>. 771 

where such men :ire found, or what they are doing, they may not 
he blacksmiths as -lack was, but they are "Forgers " all the same, 
if they are only ingenious for dishonesty, and make their money 
by make-believes. And I say, without the least hesitation, that 
the blacksmith who works honestly and well from Monday morn- 
ing to Saturday night, making good horseshoes, is a better man 
before earth and heaven than the minister who dawdles along all 
through the week doing nothing in particular, and then on the 
Sunday morning preaches a wretched sermon. I know that be- 
cause I have done both. 

The second thing we have to make sure about in this new cen- 
tury is a good home, and this of course presupposes a good wife 
and a good husband. Now I think a great many men marry in 
these times who don't get a wife, and a great many women marry 
who don't get a husband, and they never find their mistake out 
until, perhaps, it is past all remedy except that of coming to Chicago 
to get a divorce, which may be worse than the disease. I fear, 
again, this trouble comes very often in this way. Young women 
before they get married are only anxious to get what they call all 
the accomplishments. But they don't mean by this how to make 
good bread, to boil a potato, or roast a piece of beef, to knit a 
stocking, to make a shirt and wash it and iron it, to keep a home 
smelling as sweet as wild roses and shining like a new silver dollar. 
It seems to me rather they mean how to do tatting, how to draw 
what Mrs. Browning calls wonderful sheperdesses with pink eyes, 
how to speak French very hard to be understood and how to dis- 
course music so difficult as to make you remember Johnson's grim 
joke when they took him to hear some music of that sort, and 
noticed he did not seem to care for it. "That is very difficult 
music," said one who was with him. " I wish it was impossible," 
the old man answered. This is what our girls call all the accom- 
plishments, these they get and then they get married. 

And the young man sometimes gets an education just about as 
delectable to fit him for a, husband. We call it sowing his wild 
oats. The worst of it I must not name ; the better end of it now 
and then is calculated to teach him how to play billiards rather 
than to read books, how to prefer cards to every other kind of 
picture, and sometimes how to be more familiar with the inside of 



772 OUR NATIONAL JUBILKK. 

the hells of his town than the churches. Then he goes into soci 
ety, meets the young woman with all the accomplishments, believes 
her to be the exception to her entire sex in angelic beauty and 
perfect excellence, gives her what little heart he has left, poor fel- 
low, and so the match is made and they are wedded, husband and 
wife so long as they both shall live — if they can stand it. 

That is often like a wedding we had once in Yorkshire ; as the 
man came out of church with his bride on his arm he met an old 
companion who said to him. " There lad, I wish thee much joy, 
thou's gotten t' end of all thee trouble." This was good news, so 
he went on his way rejoicing ; but it turned out a bad job, he had 
got a wife with all the acomplishments except she could not keep 
house ; so one day, when he met his crony again, he said to him 
with a very doleful heart, " I thowt thaa towd me John as I wer 
cumin aat o' Ginseley church, when I went to get wed, a'd gotten 
to t' end of all me trouble." " I did tell thaa soa," John answered, 
" I didn't tell thaa which end." 

Then there is another match not quite so bad as this, but still 
bad enough. And that is when the husband and wife are both 
capable, both capital, and have every thing the heart can wish for 
except a real good honest love. The man is clever, so is the 
woman ; she wants a home, he can give her one ; she wants a husband, 
he wants a housekeeper ; he will bring in the living and foot the 
bills, and she will slave and save and hear a great deal of growling 
then about what he calls " the extravagance of them women." 
Now a good home can no more bloom out of such a life as that in 
this new century than a damask rose can bloom on an iceberg. It 
is tyrant and slave, or else it is two slaves. It is two strings full 
of nothing but harsh discords constantly under the ban of the 
daily life. But there is a wedding which is just as good as gold, 
true and sweet every time, and sure to result in a good home ; and 
that is when a man and woman, understanding what a good home 
and a true wedding means, are drawn together by that sure Provi- 
dence which still makes all right matches in spite of the manceuver- 
ing of our prejudice and pride to prevent them. When they come 
together in a fair equality, not as the poet sings as moonlight unto 
6unlight, but as " perfect music unto noble words." Yes, from 
Eastport and San Francisco, eastward and westward, a youth and 



ORATION RET. ROBERT COLLTER, D.D. 773 

maiden shall come with this equal reverence each for the other in 
their hearts. They may see a great many men and women more 
beautiful and noble to other men and women than they are, but 
they shall never see those they are looking for until they meet in 
this town of yours, it may be, and it is borne in on them that they 
are meant for husband and wife. It is no matter then if the one 
be beautiful and the other homely, or if all the world is womb ring 
over the match. Theirs is still the greatest wonder that God should 
have given them this great gift as the end of all their hopes and 
fears. I know what such a wedding means for the home and for the 
life. It abides where there is no manning or giving in marriage, 
but where men and women are like the angels of God. Chance and 
change make no difference on the golden wedding day. After fifty 
years of such a wedded life the glory of the maiden of twenty 
cannot be seen by reason of the glory which excelleth in the good 
old wife of seventy. Another thing to take to heart tins day is 
that you young men shall go ahead, get married in this way, make 
these good homes and raise noble families of children for the nation 
instead of dawdling along until the bloom and glory of your life is 
over for fear the world will fail you if you take this step. It is a 
great mistake for a young man to think he can wait as long as he 
will before he takes a wife, and still be a whole true man for this 
grand era. But a great many do this, and if you ask them how it 
is, they will tell you they cannot do any better, they cannot ask a 
woman to marry them out of a mansion and go live in a poor man's 
cottage ; the woman they want could not live in a cottage, if she 
would, and would not if she could ; she is not fit to be a poor man's 
wife, and so they must wait until they get about so much money. 
Now I say that the woman who is not fit to be a poor man's wife, 
as a general rule, is not fit to be any man's wife. Suppose again she 
is fit to be a poor man's wife, and therefore all the fitter to be a rich 
man's wife, and he dare not ask her to leave her father's mansion, 
and go live with him in a poor man's cottage, but lets " I dare not" 
wait upon "I would" until the best of their life is over, and then gets 
married, why one of the first things she tells him is that she would 
have been very glad indeed to marry him ten or fifteen years 
sooner if he had only said so. The weddings that are sometimes 
almost as sad as funerals to me are those that might have come 



774 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

and should have come in the brave May days of life, but foi the 
sake of this wealth bought at a price no man should pay, the day 
was driven forward until the finest strength and bloom of the life 
had gone. Let no young man in whose life the new hope of 
America hides itself make this fatal blunder as he stands on the 
edge of the new century, don't shunt off on a side track and wait 
too long for a train of circumstances to roll along and enable you 
to get married. Make sure of these three things — a good honest 
stroke of work, a good name, and a good wife, just as soon as you 
can, and then the older men will leave the whole venture gladly in 
your hands when our time comes, and get away to our rest. 

One thing more and I have done. As we take care of our work, 
our life and our homes, we must also take care of our Government. 
In a Government like ours there is one sure law. It is like that 
of the water-works in my city, through which the water rises to the 
exact line of the water-mark in the tower and not a line above that, 
no matter if the whole city should pray to have it so. And so in our 
Central and State Governments, in everything we have to our name, 
as citizens of this Republic, we shall find that the public virtue, 
manliness and honesty in Washington, in Springfield and in Madi- 
son, is just the marrow of the private nature and good sense of the 
citizens, who elect these men to take care of the machine. We 
must have honesty, intelligence, courage and manliness in ourselves, 
or we shall not have it where it can do most good and most harm. 
So we must not elect our man because he can make a fine speech, 
but because he is a man to be trusted and is trusted by those who 
know him best. He may make very fine speeches and do very 
mean things. Nothing comes cheaper than good talk, and I think 
we have had about enough of it within the last few years to open 
our eyes. We are in very much the condition the people were in 
at a town on one of our south-western rivers. There was an old 
skipper who ran a steamboat up and down the river, and was by 
all odds the most profane man in that section. But one day his 
boat ran into a mud-bank near the little town, and there she stuck, 
one end in the water and the other in the mud, and would not stir 
an inch for all his swearing. So thinking what was best to be 
done, he called one of the deck-hands and said: "You go up into 
that air town, find the folks who belong to meetn', tell 'em I got 



ORATION — REV. ROBERT COLLTER, D.D. 775 

religion and want 'em to come and hold prayer-meet'n on my boat." 
The news made a vast sensation ; the people came in a crowd, they 
found the old skipper standing ready to receive them. " Go aft 
brethren," he said, "go aft, go aft," and aft they went, until the 
weight at the water end weighed the steamer down, and she began 
to slip into deep water. This was what he wanted ; he saw her 

clear and then yelled : " meetn's out, d n you, jump ashore, 

quick," and jump they did, and that was the end of his conversion. 
That is the way with some of the men who want to represent 
us ; they belong to both sides, always did and always will. What 
they want is to float their venture on false pretences. We must 
watch them, take care of them, and whether we are Democrat or 
Republican, elect only the man of a tried honesty, and then when 
we get hold of such a man we must stand by him and hold up his 
hands and his heart. Never mind what the other side says in the 
heat and passion of party strife ; the spawn of party strife is the 
shame and disgrace of our era. It breaks down all the guards of 
truth and fair speech, looks on every man not on its side with an 
evil eye, and pursues its antagonist with the relentlessness of the 
find. We can have no part or lot in such mean work. We have to 
search for and to find virtue, honesty and fidelity in Democrat and 
Republican alike, to maintain those who are well proven in these 
things at all costs, and no other kind, and then there can be no 
doubt but that we are to have through the ages to come, a noble, 
beautiful and strong Republic. So may God bless us on this new 
day of a new century. 






ELEMENTS OF OUE PEOSPERITY. 

AN ORATION BY S. H. CARPENTER, LL.D., PROFESSOR 
IN THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN. 

DELIVERED AT MADISON, WIS. , JULY 4TH. 1876. 

Fellow-Citizens — We are met to day to celebrate the demon- 
stration of a great truth ; the truth that Liberty is not the baseless 
dream of visionary enthusiasts ; that a government by the People 
may be stable and lasting. Tried by the vicissitudes of a century, 
this Republic has withstood every shock, and has passed from a 
dimly-seen hope to a magnificent reality. It has gathered under 
its protection men of every language, and proved that Freedom i3 
the Right of man by uniting them into one People, by the firm 
bond of loyalty to the same great truth. 

Youth has no Past. Its active energy sees only the Present. 
Age has a past, to which it fondly looks, when its waning strength 
seeks solace in recalling the prowess of its early years, and boasts 
of deeds no longer possible to its lessened vigor. We have no 
musty records to search, no far-reaching history to recall. Our 
heroic age has hardly passed. Our golden youth has not yet stif- 
fened into the harshness of an iron present. The memory of those 
still living holds the fresh records of our progress. Men whose 
natural force has not yet abated have seen our weakness grow to 
power, have seen the wilderness transformed into a blooming 
garden, and stately cities rise as by the enchanter's wand from the 
untamed soil. But shall not youth glory in his strength ? Shall 
a just pride not lay hold of present achievement as well as past 
glory ? Behind us are gathered the materials for our heroic his- 
tory. Age is hastening after us, and to-day we turn the first 
century of our national existence. 

There is a power in Antiquity — in the feeling that behind us is 
a long line of noble ancestors, a solid inheritance in the glories of 

776 



ORATION S. H. CARPENTER, LL.D. 777 

the Past. It curbs the wayward strength of youth, and adds 
dignity to the compacted vigor of manhood. This advantage is 
rapidly coming to us. "We have a common inheritance in the 
heroism of the Revolution. 

On an occasion like this when we stand at the summit of a 
century of unbroken success, our minds alternately follow the lead 
of Memory casting her proud glance backward over the brilliant 
past, and Hope casting her confident gaze into a future full of 
greater promise. We look backward over the slow receding years 
of the century just closed, and we see a little band of heroes, 
jealous of their God given rights, seeing not the weakness of their 
numbers, but only the strength of their cause, with a sublime con- 
fidence in the ultimate victory of right, resolutely facing the fore- 
most power of the world. Looking out into the deepening dark- 
ness that shrouded the coming years of almost hopeless struggle, 
they boldly, almost defiantly proclaimed not merely their own right 
to liberty, but the right of man to self-government. They struck 
a blow for humanity. 

That contest was not the mere shock of contending armies ; it 
was the fiercer shock of contending ideas. It was not the manoeu- 
vring of legions on the field of battle ; it was the marshalling of 
principles in a struggle that should determine whether the world 
should go forward, and offer a new field for the enlarging powers 
of man, or whether it should stagnate on the dead level of old 
ideas, stupidly satisfied with the good it had gained. 

At last, after eight years of struggle, of alternate victory and 
defeat, Freedom was secured, but their allotted work was not yet 
done. A nation was to be formed out of the discordant elements 
which the pressure of necessity had forced into a temporary union. 
Statesmanship was to complete the work of generalship, and unite 
into a compact whole the fragments thus far held together by a 
loose cohesion. Our revolutionary fathers proved equal to the task, 
and by this victory over passion, by succeeding where all other 
men had failed, they placed the world under everlasting obliga- 
tion. Other patriots had fought as bravely, had endured as heroic- 
ally ; but no other patriots so conquered self, so vanquished preju- 
dice, so laid the foundations of a nation in mutual concession for 
the general good. 



A 



77fc> OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

God is a prompt paymaster. The reward was not long deferred. 
The period of unexampled prosperity followed. All the world 
claimed the privilege of sharing the benefit of our sacrifices. They 
swarmed in upon us from every nation of Europe, attracted by a 
fertile soil, a healthy cli nate, and the more alluring promise of a 
free government. At the close of the Revolution the entire popula- 
tion of the United States numbered but three millions. They were 
mostly confined to the narrow strip between the Alleghany Moun- 
tains and the sea. Here and there adventurous bands had crossed 
over into the fertile plains beyond, only to find their advance stub- 
bornly contested by the Indians who refused to leave, without a 
struggle, the hunting-grounds of their fathers. The valleys of the 
Ohio and Mississippi were still an unbroken wilderness, except 
where French traders or Missionaries had established their posts 
to seek the goods or the good of the red man, or where sturdy 
pioneers had made their precarious settlements. The great Lakes 
were almost unexplored, and the districts adjoining were still more 
unknown. Marquette, Allouez and La .Salle, had pushed their 
daring discoveries into this remote region, but theirs was the genius 
of discovery, not of settlement. The French could discover and 
subdue, but they could not organize. 

It is but eighty years since this vast region, stretching from the 
Alleghany Mountains to the Pacific Ocean, was opened to settle- 
ment. Men now living have seen the western line of civilization 
creep timidly from the boundaries of New York and Pennsylvania, 
push steadily westward through the forests of Ohio, cross the fertile 
prairies of Indiana and Illinois, sweep with hardly a perceptible 
check beyond the Mississippi, strike boldly across the vast plains 
of the West, climb the heights of the mountains, descend the fur- 
ther slope of the Sierras, to meet a resistless barrier only on the 
distant shores of the Pacific Ocean. Men now living have seen 
this waste wilderness converted into a blooming garden, covered 
with fruitful harvests, and dotted with the peaceful homes of more 
than ten millions of people. The Indian has retreated before his 
fate ; barbarism has yielded to civilization. The niggardly gifts 
of Nature have been replaced by the wealth that plenty pours with 
a full hand into the lap of industry. Labor here reigns king, un- 
vexed by any rival. The air hums with the busy whirr of machi- 



ORATION S. H. CARPENTER, LL.D. 77'J 

nery. The engine flashes by, weaving, like a gigantic shuttle, the 
bonds that bind distant States in one community of interest. 

Let us not stand mute in stupid admiration of our present great- 
ness, but let us in the spirit of true philosophy seek to discover the 
basis upon which our prosperity rests, and the laws and controlling 
forces by which our success has been wrought out. A true civil- 
ization rests upon a moral basis. The civilization of the old world 
had made physical well-being its highest ideal, but it did not prove 
capable of indefinite expansion: it could not rise; it could not 
advance. Here civilization laid hold of moral forces, and pressed 
forward with a power well-nigh resistless. Physical good soon 
reaches its limit. Even that art that aims only at material beauty 
soon attains its highest ideal, and falls back upon itself to minister 
to passion and to hasten the ruin of the glittering culture which 
it has created, that conception of the true nature of man that con- 
siders him as a moral force, and not a mere intelligent machine, 
that looks at nature from its spiritual side, that fixes the ideal of 
civilization not on the low level of mere physical improvement, but 
on the higher plane of intellectual and moral culture, that aims at 
perfect manhood, and rates birth or wealth below character, affords 
the only ground for a safe and steady advance. This great truth 
was emphasized on every battle-field of our late war. The idea of 
freedom won. That conception of human society that graded men 
according to physical accidents yielded to the superior power of 
that idea which, ignoring all physical differences, upon the broad 
basis of human equality, organized society according to the theory 
of equal rights and equal and exact justice to all. 

Three steps led to our present unexampled prosperity. 

The first was the Declaration of Independence which first dis- 
tinctly enunciated to the world the doctrine of Equal Rights. It 
was a decided step in advance to ignore all accidental differences, 
and to unify all mankind on the single principle of absolute equality. 
The Declaration was a defiant challenge of the old theory of gov- 
ernment ; it called in question principles quietly acquiesced in for 
centuries. To assert the rights of the people was a great step, but 
it was a step that might lead downwards to anarchy, and through 
anarchy to despotism, as in France, as well as upward to Liberty 
and free government. The other half of the truth must be told in 



780 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

the equally definite assertion of the absolute and inherent need of 
government — thus accurately adjusting the political relations of the 
citizen. Man demands government no less imperatively than 
liberty ; he demands government, because only through it can he 
secure liberty. 

The presence of a common enemy, and the manifest need of 
union held the States together until the close of the revolutionary 
war. When the compulsion of this necessity was no longer felt, 
the need of a closer bond — one originating from within, and knit 
from well-defined principles, securing a union by the recognition of 
ends yet to be gained in common, beyond the mere acquisition of 
liberty — soon became evidenty' Liberty is only a condition of good 
government rendering it possible ; it is not a cause compelling it. 
The yoke of foreign domination had been throwu off ; the yoke of 
self-government must yet be put on. The need for something more 
than had. yet 'been gained was shown by a loss of public respect for 
the general government, disordered finance, depreciated currency, 
with all the evils incident, mutual jealousies, conflict of jurisdiction 
between the States themselves ; between States and the general 
government, threats of armed collision ; the most alarming systems 
of anarchy threatened the public weal, until all that had been gained 
by eight years of war seemed on the point of being lost for want of 
a far-sighted statesmanship to resolutely grapple with and solve 
the problem now presented. There was but one way out of these 
difficulties — to go forward, to assert as clearly the right of the 
nation to protection against anarchy as the Declaration had assert- 
ed the right of man to protection against tyranny ; to build upon 
the foundation that had been so heroically laid in times of war and 
trial ; to sow the vacant field with ideas that promised a fruitful 
harvest, and no longer leave it to grow up to thorns that promised 
only increasing irritation. Happily for us, the men of that day 
were not wanting in the great crisis. Upon the firm basis of Equal 
Rights as laid down in the Declaration of Independence, they built 
the solid superstructure of Constitutional government. From scat- 
tered, discordant fragments, they compacted a new nation. 

The second step towards the prosperity of this people was taken 
in the adoption of the Constitution in 1787. This was not simply an 
alliance between States. That had already been secured by the 



ORATION S. H. CARPENTER, LL.D. 781 

Articles of Confederation, the utter inadequacy of which could no 
longer be concealed. This was a union of the people — the birth 
of a nation — an assertion of the right of man to government, as the 
Declaration of Independence was an assertion of his right to 
liberty. 

The greatest victories of those days that " tried men's souls " 
were not won on the field of battle, where man meets man in the 
rude shock of brute force, but in the senate chamber, where mind 
meets mind in the conflict of principles, where inveterate prejudice 
gives way to the calm pressure of reason, where narrow selfishness 
yields to the demands of enlarged patriotism. The adoption of the 
Constitution was such a triumph. To have been the first to take 
this step in advance is glory enough for any nation. Speaking of 
the Constitution, Lord Brougham says : " The regulation of such 
a union upon pre-established principles, the formation of a system 
of government and legislation in which the different subjects shall 
not be individuals, but States, the application of legislative princi- 
ples to such a body of States, and the devising means for keeping 
its integrity as a Federacy, while the rights and powers of the in- 
dividual States are maintained entire, is the very greatest refinement 
in social policy to which any state of circumstances has ever given 
rise, or to which any age has ever given birth." Says De Tocque- 
ville : " This theory was wholly novel, and may be considered as a 
great discovery in modern political science." It was not only 
because she had championed the Rights of Man that America 
placed the world under lasting obligation ; it was also because she 
established Freedom upon rational principles, had harmonized 
Liberty and Law, and thus made a durable democracy possible, 
that the world looks to her example to learn the way to lasting 
liberty. 

The last, and no less important step, was taken when the Ordin- 
ance of 1787 was adopted for the government of the North-west 
territory. The adoption of this Ordinance antedates the adoption 
of the Constitution, but its influence in national affairs was sub- 
sequent to the immediate influence of that instrument. This docu- 
ment shows an enlarged and advanced view of the powers and 
duties of government. It enunciates several principles which were 
also incorporated into the Constitution of the United States. It 



782 ORU NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

laid down the broad and then quite novel principle of absolute 
religious toleration ; it asserted the inviolability of contracts, thus 
placing the authority of integrity above that of legislatures ; it first 
clearly uttered the sentiment now so familiar that " Religion, 
Morality and Knowledge, being necessary to good government and 
the happiness of mankind, schools and the means of education shall 
forever be encouraged ; " it insisted upon keeping good faith with 
all men, and demanded justice even for the Indians, who had for 
ten years been waging a cruel and bloody war against the settlers 
in this very territory ; it at once and forever prohibited slavery, 
and thus led the way to its final eradication from this country. 

We need trace our history no further. Here we find the grand 
secret of this unexampled prosperity and the conditions of our 
future success. In this triple recognition of the rights of man, the 
just limits of government, and the paramount claims of Religion, 
Morality and Education, we find an ample explanation. Upon the 
foundation of Equal Rights, as laid in the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence, a Constitutional government was erected upon the im- 
movable pillars of Religion, Morality and Knowledge, based not 
on arbitrary enactment and secured by force, but resting still more 
firmly in the conscientious regard of the people. We have no 
religion defined by the State and enforced by law ; we have what 
is better, Religion voluntarily practised by the people. We do not 
have an education thrust upon the people by compulsion ; we have 
what is better, a people who do not need the coarse stimulus of 
this coercion. In the recognition of these moral forces as deter- 
mining the condition of mankind, we may find the reason why we 
have succeeded in securing at the same time liberty for the people 
and stability for the government. Until taught by our example,, 
the world believed that liberty was but another name for license 
and lawless anarchy ; that stability was the prerogative of des- 
potism. But the tottering thrones and fleeing kings of the Old World 
have proved that the arm of Force is not strong enough to hold a 
kingdom stable, and that the government is most firmly seuted that 
rests upon conceded rights, and guards the rights of the people 
with a sleepless jealousy. 

The nations of the world are met in the City of Peace to offer us 
their heartfelt congratulations, bringing the accumulated treasures, 



ORATION — S. H. CARPENTER, LI..D. 783 

of art and industry to grace this glad occasion. Fit place for 
such a gathering, fit occasion for such a celebration ! It is the 
Festival of Peace, as well as the birthday of Freedom. Industry 
bends its tireless energies to lighten the pressure of wearisome 
labor. Art, hand in hand with Toil, brings her treasures to grace 
our holiday. Even grim-visaged War puts on the garb of Peace, 
and with an awkward smile displays his death-dealing enginery in 
bloodless repose. The sword-girt, mail-clad warrior is no longer 
the world's hero. The conqueror is no longer the ideal man. The 
hero of to-day is the Inventor who elevates mind by freeing muscle, 
who bends his blest endeavors to lift the yoke of labor from the 
bowed necks of the toiling millions. 

The nations are all here, and this friendly gathering utters anew 
the greeting of Heaven, " Peace on Earth, goodwill to Men." We 
do not celebrate this day alone. Others share in our joy. Every 
nation on the globe above the lowest level of barbarism gives us a 
hearty God-speed, for there is not a people that does not feel the 
beneficent impulse which our example has given the world. Liberty 
has a new meaning since man has proved that a king is not a ne- 
cessary evil ; that the majesty of right is above the majesty of 
man ; that the sway of justice is more enduring than the rule of 
force. This grand truth, first proclaimed by the heroes of the 
elder days, first demonstrated by our convincing example, has been 
wrought into the convictions of men by the steady pressure of our 
advancing prosperity. Well may the world join us in celebrating 
this peaceful triumph, for all men have part in our glory and share 
our gain. Our Declaration of Independence gave a voice to the 
half-formed thoughts of humanity, and brought to man a knowl- 
edge of his inalienable rights. Our Constitution lias made true 
liberty possible not only for this nation, but for all mankind. 

The Dead too are here: — not dead, but living in the deeds which 
they wrought and in the affectionate remembrance of their fellow- 
men. Their immortal spirits see the fruits of their labors, and to- 
day they rejoice with us. From Concord, Lexington, Bunker 
Hill ; from the stubborn contest with cold and hunger at Valley 
Forge ; from Cowpens, King's Mountain ; from Saratoga and York- 
town ; from every nameless battle-field of the Revolution ; from 
the fresher graves of our last and sternest war, their jubilant spirits, 



784 OtJR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

throng in upon us to-day, and join in the gladness of the grand 
chorus of praise that swells up before the throne of the God of 
Nations. The sea, too, gives up its dead. From every ocean 
grave, from the quiet depths of Erie and Champlain, those who 
sunk to their peaceful rest amidst the noise and tumult of battle 
rise to join us in the celebration of this day which their valor and 
devotion bequeathed to us. They are all here : I need not speak 
their names. Time would fail me to mention the surrounding 
cloud of exulting witnesses. The Golden Gates stand wide open 
to-day, and well may Heaven join Earth in celebrating a day like 
this. We do not exult over the blood-stained triumphs of War ; 
we rejoice in the victories of Peace. We boast not of conquest ; 
we glory in Freedom. We count not the struggle ; we see the 
gain. 

Then let us celebrate this day with glad rejoicing, for it is a day 
fit to be remembered through all time. Through a frail infancy, 
through a wayward youth, Freedom has passed forward to the full 
strength and the maturer powers of a vigorous manhood. The 
nation has attained its majority. Let all the World join in our 
rejoicing. Let all Nature, from the heights of Summer, crowned 
with her most gorgeous beauty, with every inarticulate symbol, 
voice the universal joy, as she joins man in his jubilant chorus of 
praise to the Giver of all good. 



THE KELATION OF EDUCATION TO THE STATE. 

AN ADDRESS BY PROF. A. L. CIIAPTN, D. D. PRESIDENT 
OF BELOIT COLLEGE. 

DELIVERED AT JANESVILLE, WIS., .TULY 4TII, 187G. 

Mr. President and Fellow-Citizens, — T am asked to speak 

of the Relation of our Higher Institutions of Learning to the 
State. The time forbids a full discussion of the theme in an ab- 
stract way. But this is our centennial anniversary and our 
thoughts naturally revert to the time when the foundations of our 
great republic were laid. From fliese reminiscences, I may draw 
a few facts in illustration of my theme. I never hear that declara- 
tion of independence, which has just been read, without wonder 
and admiration for the profundity of its principles, the strength of 
its logic and the finished grace and force of its rhetoric. Whence 
came all this ? we naturally ask. Is it all the fresh product of the 
brains of Jefferson and his fellows on that committee ? Did this 
youngest of nations come all at once upon the grand foundation 
truths of civil government? Ah, no, the attendant facts tell us 
that now in the fulness of time, God has gathered the wisdom of 
the ages to find on this new continent a field fit for its practical ap- 
plication. 

Consider the juncture of time when these truths were thus 
brought forth. In English history, the sixty or seventy years from 
the middle of Queen Elizabeth's reign to the date of the restora- 
tion constitute the period of the intensest action of those intellec- 
tual and moral forces which are most powerful in forming national 
character. Of this period, it has been well said, " In point of real 
force and originality of genius, neither the age of Pericles, nor the 
age of Augustus, nor the times of Leo X., nor of Louis XIV. can 
come at all into comparison with it." It, was the age of Bacon 
and Spenser ami Shakespeare, of Sidney and Hooker and Napier, 
of Milton and Cudworth and Hobhes and other great lights of liter- 

oO 785 



786 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

ature and philosophy, whose creative minds gave a new impulse to 
civilization, not for Great Britain alone, but for the world. It was 
the age which gave to English speaking people the version of the 
Scriptures, whose influence for the ability and prosperity of the 
empire was so gracefully recognized by Queen Victoria, when in 
answer to the embassy of an African prince who came with costly 
gifts, and asked in return to be told the secret of England's great- 
ness and glory, she, instead of displaying the crown jewels, or 
pointing to the wealth laid up in the vaults of the Rank of Eng- 
land, handed the ambassadors a beautifully bound copy of the 
Bible, and said, " Tell the prince this is the secret of England's 
Greatness." It was the ace when the universities of Oxford and 
Cambridge, " the two eyes of England," were doing their best 
work, and passing through changes which brought them to their 
complete organization. And this was the age of the exodus of the 
Pilgrim fathers and other founders of those American colonies. 
Under the influence of these universities these men were formed, 
and they brought that influence along with them. Hence it is 
truly said that the spirit of the English universities, of English 
scholars, pervaded the English colonies. The men who planted 
the first colonies of New England were in larger proportion, liber- 
ally educated men than was ever before known in the history of 
nations. It is estimated that when Harvard college was founded 
in 1638 there was a graduate of the English university at Cam- 
bridge for every 200 or 250 of the inhabitants then living in the 
few villages of Massachusetts and Connecticut, besides sons of Ox- 
ford not a few. 

Before the declaration of independence, ten colleges had been 
founded in the several colonies, following the lead of Harvard in 
Massachusetts, and the college of William and Mary, in Virginia. 
And the public men who led off the great movement of revolution 
till it culminated in independence and the forming of our constitu- 
tion, were men who had enjoyed the benefit of this high culture. 
Hence it came that Lord Chatham, sjieaking in Parliament of the 
first continental congress and of the papers issued by it said, that 
though he studied and admired the free states of antiquity, the 
master-spirits of the world, yet for solidity of reasoning, force 
of sagacity and wisdom of conclusion, no body of men could 
stand in preference to this congress. The great thoughts of those 



ADDRESS — ritOF. A. L. CliAlUX. 787 

great thinkers more than two thousand years ago, Plato and Aris- 
totle and Socrates, the master of both — the contributions of 
Cicero and Seneca and Quintilian — these accumulated stores of 
ancient philosophers, increased by the fresh thinking of that won- 
derful age just noticed, found scope for practical application in the 
beginnings of our state. Now I wish I could bring before vou 
on a larger scale, that scene of a hundred years ago, which we to- 
day commemorate. You are all familiar with it as sketched by 
our American artist, Trumbull, a fancy sketch no doubt, in some of 
its details, but true to the great realities of the occasion as it is true 
to the features of the leading men of the occasion. There are 
seated in the hall, in venerable state, with the rich dress aud 
solemn mien of the olden time, the fathers of the republic, think- 
ing in dead earnest on the momentous step they are taking. Here 
in the front sits the president, John Hancock, and standi no- imme- 
diately before him, to present the paper they have to report, the 
five gentlemen of the committee. That president is a graduate of 
Harvard college, and of that committee, three represent respec- 
tively the three oldest colleges of the country; and who are the 
other two ? Benjamin Franklin and Roger Sherman, who have, 
living in the atmosphere of liberal culture and stimulated by it, 
used at second hand, the appliances of that culture and lifted them- 
selves from the printer's case and the shoemaker's bench to be the 
acknowledged peers of the rest. Further, we note that of the 
fifty-six who signed the declaration, thirty-two are men of college 
training, seven more have had a special professional culture, its full 
equivalent. The scholar had already an acknowledged and an 
honored place in politics, and through the affinities and necessary 
co-operation of all departments and grades of popular education, 
his influence was diffusing itself through the whole population, so 
that so called self-made men had an open way before them to 
places of highest position and trust. 

The lesson of the hour is simply this, let us fairly estimate and 
appreciate what liberal education has done for our nation in the 
past, and let us still foster and encourage the institutions which hand 
in hand with our popular schools of every grade are diffusing intelli- 
gence and wisdom and virtue and godliness all over the land, to be 
the strength and salvation of the slate, if God will, as long as the 
world shall stand. 



THE INFLUENCE OF POPULAR EDUCATION UPON 
THE NATION. 

AN ADDRESS BY PROF. S. S. HOCK WOOD, OF THE WIS. 
STATE NORMAL SCHOOL. 

DELIVERED AT JANESVILLE, WIS., JULY 4tII, 1876. 

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen, — I know very well 
what I am expected to say. I know what is the proper and conven 
tional story to tell you. I know that the emblematic bird must be 
plucked to-day in your very presence until he looks like a Thanks- 
giving turkey on the morning of that inevitable Thursday in 
November. I know as well as tongue can tell that nothing less 
than filling the air about you with his Centennial plumes will satisfy 
your patriotic demands. Nothing less than the veritable "Old 
Abe" himself, fluttering and screaming in your faces, will fully 
come up to the requirements of this occasion. But there are two 
insuperable reasons that stand in my way. In the first place, the 
glorious old " War Eagle of the Eighth Wis. Vol.," is at this mo- 
ment playing a star engagement at Philadelphia, where he is flap- 
ping his broad wings in the face of the world ; and in the second 
place, in the division of labor for this day, the centennialism has 
been handed over to the silver-tongued lawyers and orators who 
are to follow me, and quiet themes have been assigned the school- 
masters. 

I have always thought that great occasions are never wanting to 
those who are equal to them, and that fame and honor and the 
abiding confidence of the country wait upon the man who proves 
himself equal to every occasion. 

I still believe in that doctrine, and on the other hand, I see the 
oblivion that shall hide the man who speaks on this occasion, and 
this day, the day of all other days, the occasion of all occasions 
that have seen the light in this country for a hundred years. 

But where is the man who can utter the thought of this supreme 



ADDRESS — TOOF. S. S. UOCKAVOOI). 789 

moment? Who shall fitly speak the word Columbia has waited a 
century to hear ? 

It is not you, my friends and fellow-citizens, who alone parti- 
cipate in these exercises: the living heroes of the past, whom we 
call dead, are coining up from every part of the land and world, 
to make an unseen audience into whose listening ears the words of 
every speaker must fall this day. 

I consider myself fortunate in the theme assigned me. The last 
great thought of the world is popular education. The ripe fruit 
of the wisdom of all the ages is the enlightenment and consequent 
elevation of the masses. 

To have discovered the grand laws of the stellar universe and 
marked out the paths of the planets, to have invented movable 
type, to have solved the riddle of the circulation of the Mood, to 
have tamed the lightning, and turned steam into a. beast of burden, 
to have invented poetry and song, and developed art. were mighty 
things for mighty men to do, hut to have discovered that the divine 
use of all these was for the education and refinement of the toiling 
millions, was the mightiest service of all. Knowledge is not only 
power, it is hope, it is consolation ; but the wisdom of its appli- 
cation to the advancement of the common people, is the chiefest 
treasure of all time. 

The ultimate effects of the education of the people, no man can 
foretell. The gift of prophesy is gone with the lost arts, and 
therefore I only propose 4o notice a few results already achieved, 
and point out what seem to me a few of its chief tendencies. I 
shall not attempt a history of the idea. I take the district school 
as a, perfectly familiar and accepted fact. 1 take education by the 
State as a conceded reality. 1 shall not try to show how it fall; 
short of a true ideal, nor shall I discuss tin; means and methods 
for improvement. I wish to discover, if lean, some reasons for 
being better satisfied with the past, better contented with the 
present, and more hopeful for the future. 

In the growth of civilization, from time to time, have arisen 
great enterprises, enormous needs which no private means however 
freely contributed, were able to achieve, and their attainment 
has rightfully been among the true functions of government, and 
the education of (he masses is the las! Erreal labor of that kind. 



790 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

It seems to ine that the idea of popular education is the out- 
growth of the great truth, that, after providing for the support of 
life, the chief aim of mankind should be spiritual and intellectual 
culture, and some clay we shall all defend education by the State on 
this high ground. 

What is the effect of the enlightenment of the masses in the Old 
World as far as already felt? 

Why, sir, you know and the world knows that it is fast making 
kings and emperors mere figure-heads ; the scepter is rapidly be- 
coming as hollow and brittle as a bamboo walking-stick, and the 
lack of it puts a nation into the condition of Spain, with its en- 
lightened leaders whom the people cannot follow ; or into that of 
poor old Turkey, where an enlightened and progressive govern- 
ment is unable to keep step with the century because of the ignorant 
prejudice and degrading superstition of the people. 

It was once supposed that he who made the songs of a people 
was mightier than he who made their laws. 

Thirty-six years ago this very summer, the hard-cider and log- 
cabin songs carried " Old Tippecanoe and Tyler too " into the 
Presidental chair, but where is the imbecile who supposes that 
could be repeated this summer? Just imagine, if you can, the 
people of to-day swept along and consumed by the fire of such a 
purely emotional awakening. Since that time, the school-master 
has been abroad in the land, and the appeal this summer is to our 
understanding, and not to our emotions*. The political speaker, 
now, who carries his points and wins our votes, must give us rea- 
sons, not sentiments ; he must, give us logic, not emotion ; he must 
give us facts, not mere fancies ; in a word, he must convince our 
judgments and not simply inflame our passions and prejudices. 
The influence of popular education, therefore, is to enable the peo- 
ple to do their own thinking. 

I know very well that certain would-be philosophers stoutly 
maintain that the idea of the people's thinking for themselves is 
the merest moonshine and nonsense. They declare that you 
can't talk with a man ten minutes without knowing what papers 
he reads and what church he attends, and so can tell who fur- 
nishes him his religious and who his political opinions. 

In the first place the assertion is only the shadow, ten feet high, 



ADDUliSS — PROF. S. S. ROCK WOOD. 791 

of a truth, ami a shadow may he cast on a wall ten feet high hy a 
jumping-jack as well as by a man, and though a man has intelli- 
gence enough to make him read the papers and go to church, and 
although he agrees with both his editor and his pastor to-day, it by 
no means follows that he will not disagree with one or both to- 
morrow, and for reasons he can state quite as cogently as either of 
them. 

And here let me say that the newspaper of to-day is itself a 
reality, because the people have been to school, and for the same 
reason we shall never have imposed upon us a State religion. 

To educate the people is to make the state a servant, it is to 
make the government an employe, and loyalty to the flag becomes 
fealty to yourselves. To educate the people is to abolish caste. 
In the district school the problem of race-influence, which is not in 
the books, is being solved unconsciously, while others of less im- 
portance that are in them occupy the thoughts of the scholars. 

To educate all is to make each secure. The true relations of 
mine and thine are appreciated only by an enlightened people. The 
reign of brute force goes out with ignorance, and the benign reign 
of law comes in with intelligence. What we put into our schools 
we shall willingly enjoy in our government. If the men and wo- 
men who go into the common schools shall teach by precept and 
example that which gives probity of individual character, there can 
be only one result to the nation. 

The tendency of popular education is to enable the people to 
know a patriot from a demagogue, a statesman from a mere poli- 
tician. I think even now we are beginning to discriminate between 
the master of political questions and the mere juggler with party 
issues. I am glad to say to you that it appears very much as 
though the people can tell, even now, the man who can devise and 
run governmental organisms from the " Boss " who can simply in- 
vent and run party machines. 

To educate the populace is to make the civilization more com- 
plex, and like the animal organism, the more complex the higher. 
To educate a people is to increase their power of enjoyment, and 
therefore to increase their wants. What could Shakespeare be 
to a Modoc, Raphael to a Patagonian, or Beethoven to a Fejee 
Islander ? 



792 OUK NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Do you say that prisons and poor-houses have multiplied with 
the increase of schools? You forget that where there are no 
schools, the beggars and lepers (lining the streets, and the thieves 
and robbers lie in wait tor you at every turn. The stimulus to 
care for the one, and restrain the other class, i.-, the outgrowth of 
enlightened sympathy on the one hand, and of intelligent justice 
on the other. 

To educate the people is not to make the college man less, but 
the common man more ; it is to level n/>, and not down. 

The effect is not to cheapen culture, but to elevate our standards ; 
it does not impoverish the few, but enriches the many; it only 
prevents the mountain peaks from appearing so lofty by the 
mighty uplifting of the footdiills. 

And, finally, my friends, it seems to me that any element in the 
social and civil economy of a nation, that produces such results 
and tendencies as I have hinted at, is not only worthy of exalta- 
tion and glorification on her hundredth birthday, but ou all her 
birthdays to the end of time. 



OUE DUTY AND KESPONSIBILITY. 

AN ORATION BY HON. JOHN F. DILLON. 

DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION AT DAVENPORT, 

iowa, july 4th, 187G. 

Let us, gladly let us, as a solemn duty, with one accord, and at 
the outset, raise our hearts in devout thankfulness and gratitude to 
our God and the God of our fathers for the signal mercy and 
favor which hath preserved our nation entire and our liberties 
unimpaired from all perils without and perils within during the 
century which has just closed, and enabled us with such trustful- 
ness to enter upon the century to come, and with prospects so full 
of hope and cheer. 

For one hundred years has this day been commemorated, but 
the people of America have never welcomed it with such emotion 
as those with which they welcome it to-day, when the nation is 
just commencing to pass through the portals of the second 
century of its life. 

One hundred years ago, in old Independence Hall in Phila- 
delphia, was proclaimed a solemn State instrument, which, more 
than any other political document ever given to the world, has 
influenced the history of nations and affected the fortunes of 
mankind. 

It is that immortal paper and its fruits here and elsewhere, that 
gives significance to this day, and which have filled all hearts in this 
country with the common purpose of commemorating the Centen- 
nial year of our history in a manner that shall fitly distinguish it. 

The Declaration may be viewed in a two-fold aspect, first, in the 
light of its immediate purpose and effect as the instrument which 
asserted the Independence of the Colonies from the King of 
Great Britain, and second, in the light of the principles of per- 
manent and general application, which it asserted and its effects 

upon the destiny of this couuti < and upon the world at large. 

T'.i;; 



791 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

In the first view the Declaration hy itself considered is an event 
of dramatic and thrilling interest. It was made under the most 
solemn and, as far as the human eye could see, the most discouraging 
circumstances. The Colonies were feeble, without any legal 
political bond of union. They were without money, without 
established credit, without a navy and without organized armies. 
The skies were, indeed, dark, and the zealous Henry, when pressed 
with the inequality of the struggle, could only answer the argu- 
ment with more faith than reason : " God will raise us up friends." 
It was an act of lofty and heroic courage in an infant and scattered 
people, boldly to fling the gauntlet of defiance at the most obstinate 
and unforgiving of monarchs, and the proudest and most powerful 
of nations. 

The Declaration made a solemn appeal to war as the only 
remaining arbiter between the colonies and the mother country. 
The stage of debate and negotiation had now passed, and hence- 
forth in the tragic language of the great Chancellor of Ger- 
many uttered in our own days, " The decision can come from 
God only, from the God of battles, when he shall let fall from his 
hand the iron dice of destiny," and the unity of this country, like 
the unity of Germany 100 years later was, " could be obtained but 
by blood and iron."* 

But the greatest glory of the Declaration is found when it 
is viewed as the magna charta of the race, as an exposition of the 
principles of true government and national rights of man. It 
declared a new theory of government — one which revolutioned 
the basic idea on which nearly all existing governments were 
constructed. It asserted in unlimited terms and with most com- 
prehensive scope the absolute and equal rights of man — of all who, 
whatever their race or country, bear the image and superscription 
of their common fathers. 

Its central proposition — its inspiration, its vital power, its 
crowning and fadeless glory, is in the grand distinctive utterance — ■ 
worthy to be written in imperishable letters of living light across 
the face of the whole heavens that they might be read in all time, 
by all men, in every quarter of the globe : — " TTe hold these 

* Klacrko's " Two Chancellors — Gortschakoff and Bismarck." 



ORATION — HON. JOHN P. DILLON. 795 

truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal ; that they 
are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that 
among these are life, liberty and happiness." 

"That all governments derive their just powers from the 
consent of the governed." 

These were the baptismal vows which the new Republic took 
upon her lips when she entered the family of nations with fear 
and trembling one hundred years ago. Let us not forget them. 
Let us raise and keep ourselves up to the great height of 
their infinite meaning. For the name of Cod is written upon 
every human being — lofty or lowly — white or black — in the tropics 
or at the polls — and this glorious truth gives to every rational per- 
son on the earth an unquestionable title to his life, liberty, and 
manhood rights — a title which every just government ought not 
only to recognize, but secure and protect. 

It is only within a very recent period that the rights of man as 
man have been recognized by the governments established over 
him, and which demanded unlimited submission ami unquestion- 
ing obedience. 

Manhood is older than Nationality ; Brotherhood is older than 
Race. 

It is since the era of the Declaration of Independence that 
popular rights — the equal civil and political rights of all — have 
been at all recognized in the architecture of governments. All 
Asia is, and from time immemorial has been, a despotism. 
Tyrannus built the p} r ramids. The thousands who toiled upon 
them and the kingly number supposed to be entombed within 
them are alike forgotten. 

Popular rights as we understand them, and in this country 
possess them, were unknown : 

" Monarchs and conquerors there 
Proud o'er prostrate millions trod — 
The earthquakes of the human race, 
Like them, forgotten when the ruin 
That marks their shock is past." 

Passing to Europe and coming down to the middle ages " a line 
was drawn " says the judicious llallam, " between the high-born 



79G OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

and ignoble classes almost as broad as that which separated liberty 
from servitude. All offices of trust and power were in the hands 
of the nobles. A plebeian could not possess land. What was 
worse than all, labor was degrading, and a gentleman could not 
exercise any trade or follow any profession without losing the 
advantages of his rank." And lie sums up the previous condition 
of the race at large in the remarkable statement that " In every 
age and country until times comparatively recent, personal servi- 
tude appears to have been the lot of a large, perhaps the greater 
portion of mankind.* 

Even to-day, my countrymen, in most countries, ours excepted, 
the avenues to profitable labor and personal distinction are 
extremely narrow, by one as of deep-rooted prejudices, proscrip- 
tions, monopolies, class legislation and class distinctions. For- 
tunately it was after the struggles for civil and religious liberty in 
Europe had ended and feudalism had decayed, and the New 
World had received into her bosom the first seeds that took 
permanent root and ripened into Colonies that lived and flourished. 

It has been justly remarked : " The history of European society 
of the feudal system ; the record of its rise and growth is the 
history of Roman polity and primitive barbarism ; the record of its 
decline and fall is the history of modern social development. 
Ancient progress was toward extreme social and political inequal- 
ity. Modern progress is toward extreme social and political econ- 
omy. Submission was the great lesson taught by the former, 
freedom is the still greater lesson taught by the latter. Mon- 
archies and aristocracies were the flowers of the old seed ; 
democracy is the fruit of the new." 

The famous saying of Abbe Sieyes is familiar. It was made 
during the revolt of the people of France, known as the French 
Revolution, against ancient and grievous oppression, and it gave a 
strong impetus to that justifiable, but in the end perverted move- 
ment. He asked, referring to the rights of the people under 
the name of the third estate, " What is the third estate (tiers etat ?) 
and answered "Nothing." "What ought it to be?" and he 
answered, " Everything." 

* Ilallam, Middle Ages, vol. i. qh, ii. nartii. 



ORATION — HON. JOHN P. DILLON. 797 

It was on this principle — the principle of the universal will 
as the basis of the State, that nearly a quarter of a century before 
our fathers had constructed their system of government. With 
one notable, and as the event proved, must, unfortunate exception, 
they adhered to this principle. 

A more difficult task probably never devolved on the political 
founders of any State, than fell to the lot of the founders of the Amer- 
ican Republic, even after the perils of the Revolution had passed. 
The matchless wisdom with which they did their work is a perpetual 
marvel to me, and one which increases the more I contemplate it. 

Let us pause a moment and consider the situation. Our fathers 
were mainly Englishmen, and until their affections were alienated 
by the cause of the British Government, loyal Englishmen, 
reverencing the King and the Church. Observation shows us how 
difficult it is for the human mind to emancipate itself from the 
force of early impressions. History shows how difficult it is for "a 
country having monarchical traditions to develop republican insti- 
tutions." This obstacle happily was overcome, and every monar- 
chical and aristocratical element was vigorously excluded. But 
there were other and more dangerous lions in the path. Thirteen 
separate colonies there were witli their rivalries and conflict- 
ing sentiments and interests, without a common head, without 
revenue, exposed on a long frontier line without an army for 
defense, a large public debt and no resources with which to 
meet it, or means to preserve the public faith, or coufply with 
treaty obligations, and no certain means of regulating commercial 
intercourse among each other, or with foreign nations. Anarchy 
stared them in the face. The wolf, not the generous wolf of the 
Roman fable that suckled Romulus and Remus, but the ravenous 
wolf of poverty and despair — was actually prowling around the 
portals of the confederation. 

For this wretched condition of disintegration and decay, there 
was one remedy, and hut one, and that was a more perfect Union 
and a Federal Constitution as the bonds of Union, defining the 
powers of the General Government, prohibiting the exercise of 
certain specific powers to the several States and to the people. 

It is not my purpose to pass any eulogium upon the Consti- 
tution. Men may differ now, and they differed then, on the ques- 



798 OUR NATIONAL .TtTP.IL F.P.. 

tion whether too much or too little power was given to the General 
Government, whether too much or too little power was left to the 
States. Men, T say, may differ, and do differ on this subject, and these 
differences in the past have been the basis of party organizations ; 
but the clear teaching of the first hundred years of our history, 
and particularly the lesson of the slaveholders, rebellion, is that the 
early partiality of the States for their local governments and their 
dread of conferring powers on the Federal head, were such that if 
any mistake was made in adjusting the system, it was in allowing 
the centrifugal force of the States to overbalance the centripetal 
force of the National government. 

But if too little power was originally vested in the General 
Government by the terms of the Constitution, the defect has been 
largely remedied by the natural tendency of central power to grow, 
and by amendments from time to time adopted. If the late rebel- 
lion was made possible by the separate action of the Southern 
States, and if this is to be charged to States rights, yet, on the other 
hand, by reason of a majority in the loyal States having the control 
of the State organizations, it was practicable to combine all their 
power and resources to put down the rebellion, and this must be 
credited to the opposite side of the account. 

The wisdom of the distribution of power as between the Nation 
and the States gives rise to differences of opinion, but all agree 
that the^crowning glory of the founders of our institutions was the 
work by which a Republican form of government was established 
in and guaranteed to each State and the States themselves and the 
people of the States for purposes of public defense. Justice, com- 
merce and inter-communication wrought into our federal structure 
of grand and imposing proportions — thus giving us a government 
not aloof from the people, not imposed upon the people, but as broad- 
based as the universal will — " a government of all the people, by 
all the people, for all the people." 

This proud boast, if it was not true before the rebellion, by rea- 
son of the existence of slavery, is true in the utmost breadth of 
the statement, to-day. In that fiery ordeal the one national sin 
was purged. In its blood the robes of the Republic were washed 
white, and all hearts rejoice on this Centennial day that in all this 
land there is not a human being in bondage, not one proscribed by 



ORATION — HON. JOHN F. DILLON. V'.l'.l 

any provision of the Constitution, not one who cannot gladly and 
truly hail the National ensign as the Flag op the Free. 

And to-day it is prohably true that under the Constitution as 
amended, all the great essential rights of American freemen and 
citizenship are, as they ought to be, under the protecting aegis of 
the National Constitution, and the power of the General Govern- 
ment is adequate, as it ought to be, to pass the boundaries of State 
lines, without infringing the lawful and reserved rights of the 
States, in order to protect and secure from infringement or denial 
the equal rights and liberties of all, irrespective of race, party or 
condition. But if it be time that the statesmen who framed the 
amendments to the Constitution, have left it possible to any of the 
States, or to the people thereof to deny, either positively or practi- 
cally, equal civil or political rights to any citizen, one thing in my 
judgment is ascertain as the ultimate supremacy of justice, and 
that is that this omission must be and will be remedied. 

Certain rights are so fundamental, that no nation can deny them 
or permit them to be denied by any of its parts. Among these in 
a Republic founded upon the universal will and in which every 
citizen has a voice and an equal voice in all that pertains to the 
affairs of the government, is the right of every child to be educated, 
and the duty of the Government to enforce the right, or at least to 
prevent discrimination of any kind, or for any purpose, in the system 
of public education. 

Will any man in this country who believes in Republican insti- 
tutions deny that it is the duty of the State to provide for the 
education of all its children ? And that this duty should be ful- 
filled faithfully without discrimination ? And will any such man 
contend that if the duty is neglected or violated that the General 
Government, which represents all, should not have the power to 
protect and secure the rights of all in a matter so vital to its 
own life. 

Profoundly believing that universal education is the only perma- 
nent security for universal freedom, and that it is absolutely 
essential to the maintenance and successful working of a govern- 
ment based upon the universal will ; for myself let me avow and. 
declare that I regret that the subject of public education, at least 
to the extent of superintendency and guaranty, is not to be found 



800 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

nulling the constitutional powers of the General Government. 
There it belongs, for it is not merely or chiefly a matter of State 
concern whether masses of the people shall grow up in ignorance, 
but one which concerns the nation at large, for they vote not only- 
for local officers, but for Representatives in Congress, and for 
President. 

But the States, it is ever to be remembered, are integral and 
indestructible parts of the Union, and no Statesman, or Legislator, 
or Judge should consent to see tliem shorn of their powers, except 
by the deliberate action and consent of the people expressed and 
given in the mode provided in the Constitution itself. 

We must stand faithfully by the Constitution. If in any respect 
it needs or shall hereafter need change, it should be made not by 
legislative usurpation, or insidiously by judicial construction, but 
understandingly, by the specific and express consent of the people. 

The love of country is universal. It has its seat deep down in 
the human heart. It strengthens with our years ; it is not weak- 
ened by distance, and we all feel the magnetism of its wondrous 
power. Love our country ! Why should we not ? When we 
survey its vast extent, from ocean to ocean, from lakes to gulf, its 
mountains, its noble rivers, its matchless prairies, — whose useful- 
ness exceeds even their beauty; its untold resources, mineral, 
agricultural, manufacturing — its teeming and prosperous people — 
its inspiring history of lofty patriotism and generous sacrifice from 
the beginning of the Revolution to the close of the Rebellion, may 
not its sons and daughters, native and adopted, standing upon a 
plane of equal and discriminating rights before the law, be par- 
doned, if on such an occasion as this they feel and express that 
love of country which burns with an unquenchable fiame in every 
heart throughout our land ? 

The effect of what we behold depends much upon the stand- 
point from which it is viewed. Take one of the famous cathedrals 
of Europe, with its imposing proportions and divinely pictured 
glass. If beheld from the cold and dreary outside, you see indeed, 
the size, symmetry and grandeur of the edifice, but you miss its 
" dim religious light," and the glory of its pictured beauties. But 
standing within, and viewing it (to borrow the language of Haw- 
thorne) "from the warm interior of love and belief, every ray of 



>5 



ORATION HON. JOHN F. DILLON. 801 

light reveals a harmony of unspeakable splendors." So it is with 
the grand edifice of our Republic. Viewed from abroad, the un- 
friendly eye of foreign rulers cannot escape beholding the loftiness 
and size of the structure, but its transcendent and unapproachable 
glory, its unrivalled and matchless beauty are seen only by those 
who view it with the eye of patriotism and affection from within. 

Surveying thus, with pride and admiration, the growth, greatness 
and grandeur of our nation, shall we, like a vain and spoiled beauty 
beholding herself in the glass, stop here profitless, or shall we pene- 
trate beneath the gorgeous externals, and learn the cause of Ibis 
prosperity and power, and treasure up the lesson which it teaches ? 

What is the cause of this unexampled growth, development and 
prosperity ? Not alone, or chiefly, a favored climate and a fertile 
soil, but our free institutions — liberty and freedom secured by the 
Constitution of this country, symbolized by its flag, have extended 
themselves over the vast area of our territory. Free Democratic 
Institutions is the magnetic force, in constant operation, which has 
drawn to our shores so many thousands of the poor, the ojmressed 
and the enterprising of less favored lands. They come here to find 
freedom of conscience. They come here to find order and security ; 
they come here to escape the withering effects of misrule and 
tyranny ; they come here to find a nation strong enough to protect 
them, and generous enough to take them into its bosom and confid- 
ence, and to let them share almost from the first in its local affairs 
and in its municipal freedom. But above all they come because ic 
recognizes their manhood rights, and gives to every man, native 
and adopted, equal rights before the law and equal opportunities 
in every department of industry, and in all the avenues of ambition. 
Mingling with and becoming part of our own people in interests 
and in aspirations, we have, hand in hand during the century that 
is past, constantly advanced the lines of settlement from the narrow 
fringe of the Colonies on the Atlantic — following the sun, until 
every part of the country from the Atlantic to the Pacific is organ- 
ized into governments and is occupied by prosperous populations. 

My countrymen, let us never forget that without National 
Unity, this growth, this prosperity, this matchless vision of the 
future which opens before us as we gaze, could never have been 
ours, — and that it is the Federal Constitution, framed by our 

51 



802 OUJl NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

fathers, whose names we recall and whose memories we reverence 
to-day, and the Federal Constitution alone, that binds the Ameri- 
can Republic together and makes us one people, with one hope and 
one destiny. 

Standing on the divide between the century that is gone and the 
century that is to come, it is a duty belonging to true patriotism to 
pause and take an account of stock and learn our exact condition. 
In all that concerns natural growth and the general welfare, the 
showing is in a high degree satisfactory. But are there no lessons 
to learn from the experience of the past upon which it is well to 
ponder. Are there no dangers to be apprehended in the future, 
which it is wise to recognize, and prevent or remedy before it may 
be too late ? 

Some dangers, happily, have been successfully avoided, and are 
not likely to recur. In the early days Union was endangered by 
the strong determination to make us a league of States instead of 
a Government of the people. We passed down to the Rebellion. 
It was then confidently believed by the aristocratical riders of 
Europe, that the days of the Republic were numbered, and they 
prepared headstones and epitaphs. But we demonstrated by the 
vast armies which we created and the vast treasures we furnished, 
that no grovernment was so strong as one that was rooted in the 
affections of the whole people. 1,000,000 of soldiers were dis- 
banded almost in a day, without a riot and without a murmur, and 
went back to the peaceful pursuits of life. > One useful result of 
the rebellion, is that while the memory of it lasts, no other section 
of the Union will raise its hands in mad and hopeless revolt. We 
are thus secure from danger of internal strife. 

Our isolated local situation — three thousand miles distant from 
the great powers of Europe, affords the strongest guaranty of safety 
from without, while it relieves us of the necessity of entering into en- 
tangling alliances with other powers or of maintaining huge 
standing armies either for aggression or defense. A skeleton army 
of 25,000 or 30,000 meets all our necessities. In Europe the five 
great powers withdraw from industrial pursuits, and maintain at 
enormous expense, from fear of each other, an armed force of near 
4,000,000 of soldiers. The great fact in Modern Europe which 
meets the traveller at every step is the army. I have no doubt 



ORATION — HON. .JOHN F. DILLON. 803 

that the German army, disciplined, equipped, and commanded as it 
is, can at any time march victoriously from Madrid to St. Peters- 
burg, — but great, powerful, irresistible as it is at home, neither it, 
nor the combined armies of Europe, for want of shipping to trans- 
port men and munitions, can injure us on this side of the Atlantic. 
It is not possible. We are, therefore, secure from any real 
danger from without. If perils there are, they must be sought 
within. 

Real danger does not exist — at least not at present, but there 
have been discovered in the workings of our institutions during the, 
era which is past, circumstances calculated to arrest attention, if not 
to create apprehension. 

It is not the part of wisdom to pass them by — rather it is our 
positive duty not to do so — but time will admit oidy of the briefest 
mention. 

It would seem to be almost self-evident that in a government 
where the ballot is universal, it is essential to its success that there 
should be intelligence, public virtue and morality, and a real inter- 
est in public affairs on the part of the people, and particularly the 
most enlightened and virtuous of the people. And just in the last 
particular it is that the workings of our system have not been as 
satisfactory as could have been desired, especially in our large cit- 
ies. The most serious symptom I see to-day in this country is 
the marked and avowed indifference or refusal of so many of the 
best citizens to take any active part in municipal or political affairs, 
— thus abdicating their highest functions and leaving these to the 
control of wire-workers and political bummers. What can be 
worse than a carpet-hag rule? And what is carpet-hag rule? It 
is where men control public affairs *who are not identified in in- 
terest with the community which they rule and plunder. 

If the political power of this country is committed by the intel- 
ligent, the virtuous, the solid citizen, to those who manipulate 
caucuses and make politics a trade — this is but a form of carpet- 
bag rule, and extravagance and corruption are the certain results. 

How to govern our cities, especially our larger ones, is yet au 
unsolved problem. The bonded indebtedness drawing interest of 
the various municipalities in this country, is estimated to be al- 
ready the enormous sum of $850, 000,000, and it is constantly 



80 I OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

growing. Much of this is fraudulent in its inception or in the 
expenditure of the proceeds of the bonds, and the evil will grow 
and the burdens increase unless the best men in the community 
come to the front and take an active part in public affairs. 

Where a debt has been fraudulently created or the money it 
represents wastefully expended, and, especially if it draw after it 
enormous burdens, experience shows us that repudiation or partial 
repudiation is the next stage ; which often becomes epidemic, ex- 
tending to just as well as illegal indebtedness, and thus too often 
involving a forfeiture of the public faith pledged for its payment. 
In some instances the State in all its departments has actively sym- 
pathized with the repudiating municipality, and the public faith 
has been redeemed ouly through the coercion of the Supreme 
Court of the United States. In a few instances, indeed, the States 
have set the example of repudiating their own bonds ; and it was 
only last winter, in a case of this kind, that the Supreme Court at 
Washington felt itself bound to declare " that the faith of the 
State solemnly pledged has not been kept ; and were she amenable 
to the tribunals of the country, as private individuals are, no court 
of justice would withhold its judgment against her." 

Closely connected with the indifference of so many of the best 
citizens to political affairs, and the steady refusal of others to ac- 
cept public place, which is the cause of such evil consequences, is 
the intolerance and proscriptive character of party spirit. 

Parties in this country are necessary and useful. Each is a vig- 
ilant sentinel upon the other. It is, perhaps, impossible wholly to 
restrain the excess of party spirit, but no doctrine is more vicious, 
and no practice more baneful than "that to the victors belong tbe 
spoils," and that on each change of party ascendancy every officer 
in the civil service of the government is peremptorily, without 
cause, indiscriminately guillotined. Experience, capacity, fidelity, 
tried and established integrity, go for nothing, and the officer who 
possesses them is replaced by a new, inexperienced and untried 
successor. There is no high inducement to acquire skill and main- 
tain integrity, for these avail nothing where the tenure is so uncer- 
tain. But the direct tendency is to make the holder of an office 
feel an indifference when there is no reward, and many to regard 
the place only for the gains and spoils which it yields. Add to 



ORATION HON. JOHN F. DILLON. 805 

this, the low salaries which are paid to public officers, and is it any 
wonder that we have alarming and wide-spread corruption in pub- 
lic jdaces ? There is nothing more anti-republican than inadequate 
compensation for public services. 

The members of the English Parliament serve without com- 
pensation, and it is the most aristocratic body in the world. An 
aristocracy of birth and wealth. The public officers should at- 
tract the best talent and the highest character. What is the result 
of our low salaries ! It either excludes poor men from place, or 
if they accept it, the government or State, in violation of the Di- 
vine prayer, constantly leads them into temptation instead of de- 
livering them from it. 

Now, fellow-citizens, if I am right in supposing that I have 
pointed out the chief defects which the experience of a hundred 
years has discovered in the working of our system of government, 
and the only dangers which threaten it, is it not a source of great 
satisfaction that all these defects are remediable and all these 
changes such as may be avoided, and that we hold the remedy iu 
our own hand? Thank God we have demonstrated for 100 years 
the practicability of self-government. 

The result of this survey of our growth and of the workings of 
our institutions is such as to give us the greatest hope for the 
future. 

We cannot, indeed, lift the curtain to see what is in reversion 
for us. It were a supreme privilege to be able on this day to sum- 
mon an angel and bid the heavenly visitant on this favored occa- 
sion to draw aside for a moment the veil which separates time 
present from time to come, that we might all catch a glimpse of 
the fortune and fate of our country down to the next Centennial. 
This is denied us ; but we have, fellow-citizens, a yet more su- 
preme franchise. It is the power to make and mould the future. 
I speak the words with due deliberation and repeat them — we have. 
the high, grand prerogative to determine our own future. Many 
other peoples have not. They are so situated as to be liable to be 
crushed out by surrounding enemies, or their destiny is in the 
hands and subject to the policies and ambitions or whims of their 
rulers. 

We cannot know the future, but if we fail to realize the glorious 

51 



80G OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

and magnificent prospect which is auspicated by our past history 
and by our present circumstances, the fault will be exclusively ours 
or our children's. 

Fellow-citizens, we have received this great heritage of liberty 
from our fathers, not to be wasted, despoiled or lost, but in trust, 
for our children and mankind. We are thus charged in our day 
and generation with the sacred duty of preserving our institutions 
in order that their blessings may be enjoyed by others, and the 
circle of their influence be widened so as to embrace, as their situ- 
ation and circumstances will permit, other nations and peoples. 

It is not too much to say that the hope of republican institutions 
in the future, depends not only upon the maintenance of this re- 
public, but upon the successful operation of its institutions. 

If our light goes out in darkness, what remains to cheer and 
guide the struggling sons of men in other countries and in future 
times ? 

But it will not go out. On the contrary, it is the firm convic- 
tion of our people that the great doctrines of the declaration of our 
fathers, whose musical echo in other countries, as in our own, 

" Is the glad refrain 
Of rended bolt and fallen chain," 

have just fairly begun their victorious march round the world. 

Republican institutions, to be successful, need due preparation 
on the part of the people by whom they are to be administered. 
The work of preparation, like the operation of the forces of nature, 
is constantly and silently going on. Freedom is man's natural 
birthright. " Liberty, Equality, Fraternity " — alluring words, that 
awaken echoes and kindle aspirations in the heart of universal man. 
To this condition the race is constantly tending. 

It will yet surely attain it. As we stand on the lofty Pisgah of 
our present Centennial, and look out on the Promised Land of the 
Future, whose mountain-tops dimly seen in the twilight are even 
now gilded by the coming sun of Liberty, let us reverently raise 
our hearts in thankfulness to the Good Father of the race, in the 
full faith that that sun will rise and with unclouded blaze advance 
to the zenith of the heavens, sending forth its light and warmth to 
all nations of the earth. 



ORATION — HON. JOHN F. DILLON. 807 

Switzerland, a republic for six centuries, is a standing demon- 
stration of the practicability of popular institutions in Europe. 

The French Nation, let us fondly hope, will succeed in main- 
taining their liberties. Louis Philippe in leaving the shores of Re- 
publican France exclaimed — ; ' I carry with me the French Monar- 
chy, and shall descend with it to the tomb." May his prophecy be 
realized. The famous prognostication of the Great Napoleon that 
" fifty years will leave Europe Republican or Cossatek," though 
not fulfilled within the time limited, yet seems more probable of 
fulfilment than ever in favor of the first alternative. That elo- 
quent and sincere advocate of popular liberty, Emilio Castelar, as- 
sured me last summer in the strongest terms of his confident belief 
in the stability of the French Republic. 

The great German nation, whose love of liberty has been his- 
toric since the days when the people of that strong race staid the 
conquering legions of Rome, and whose fragments have been 
united in our own day by the genius of the greatest statesman of 
the age, supported by the patriotic valor of the people, will, in con- 
sequence of this love of liberty, of the solid elements of their char- 
acter and their system of universal education, be among the first 
in the changes of the future, to establish their government on the 
basis of popular sovereignty. 

Happy day when the Republic of America, which has welcomed 
and adopted as her own so many thousands of German-speaking 
people, shall reach across the ocean and clasp hands with the great 
Republic of Germany. 

Italy — the theatre of the old Roman, with his haughty pride, 
and world-wide ambition — whose fatal dowry of beauty made her 
in turn a prey to the cupidity of the Spaniards, the ambition of the 
French, the reckless Corsair of the Moslem, the home of the finest 
creations of the pencil and chisel — its fragments from Naples to 
Venice now happily united under one sway, although the freedom 
of the elder republics no longer exists and although her sons seem 
to have exchanged the courage that comes from strength for the 
craft that comes from weakness — may we not hope that during the 
next century this favored land, awakened and re-animated by 
the spirit of liberty, will be transformed into her ancient glory. 

Even in stagnant and effete Turkey the force of the people is at 



808 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

last being felt. On the 30th day of May last, the Grand Vizier 
sent the following telegram from Constantinople to the Turkish 
Minister at "Washington : " In the presence of the unanimous will 
of the people Abdul Aziz Khan has been dethroned to-day and 
Sultan Murad, heir presumptive, been proclaimed Emperor of Tur- 
key." The world moves. 

And lastly, what shall I say of that marvel of nations — the sea- 
girt kingdom of Great Britain. Shall I recall bitter memories and 
revive the contest of a hundred years ago, whose necessity arose 
not from the heart of the English people as its sentiments were 
interpreted by the great Chatham, but from the whims and preju- 
dices of a personal ruler ? God forbid it ! I claim the renown and 
achievements of the English nation as a part of our inheritance. 
They are a wonderful people. The names of the greatest poets, 
the greatest orators, the greatest statesmen, the most learned judges 
of the world are to be found in larger numbers on the pages of 
English history than in the history of any other single people. In 
no contemporary nation has the progress of the people in the re- 
covery of their rights from the grasp of hereditary rulers been 
more sure and steady than in conservative England during the 
last fifty years. Her people are prepared for Republican institu- 
tions whenever the clock of destiny shall strike the hour, for even 
now " all the institutions of England seek the genial sunshine of 
public opinion, and languish without it." 

And when that change comes, if not before, there is one beauti- 
ful land endeared to us by a thousand associations, and connected 
with our country by the tenderest ties that we hope will share in 
the fruitions of the change, and realize that independence so long 
deferred that has been the cherished dreams of her gallant people 
for so many generations. Oh ! how many hearts will bound and 
burst with joy when Ireland rising from her chains, shall take her 
place in the family of Republics, " redeemed, regenerated and dis- 
enthralled," by the spirit of universal liberty. 

Fellow-Citizens — Let us mold and trust the future, and hope 
that when our children's children, one hundred years hence, shall 
meet to commemorate the birth-day of a still united nation, they 
will behold, in both hemispheres, a grand galaxy of Republics, of 
which ours will be the bright center around which they all cluster 
but none outvie. 



MEMORIES OF THE PAST. 

AN ORATION BY HON. COLUMBUS DREW. 

DELIVERED AT JACKSONVILLE, FLA., JULY 4th, 1876. 

Fellow-citizens. — In commemorating the Centennial Anni- 
versary of Independence in Florida, we do so not as one of the Old 
Thirteen of the Confederation, but as children of that illustrious 
ancestry, and of the new-born States that have added to their 
glory. 

When the blow was struck in 1776, and the freedom of the 
Colonies was won in 1783, Florida, like the other Colonies, had 
been an appendage to the British Crown. Her breast heaved not 
in sympathetic response to the note of revolution, nor were 
her hands extended to take part in the coming struggle. When 
the bell in the State House of Philadelphia proclaimed the 
triumph of the American arms, the sword that sundered the Colonies 
from England cut, as it were, this beauteous pendant from the ear- 
drop of Freedom, and cast it into the sea. It was only groped for 
and gathered by the slow processes of a doubtful diplomacy, when 
the casket purchased by the blood of freedom should have held the 
prize intact. It was the saddle-skirt of Georgia, and when Brother 
Jonathan was in the stirrups at the coming in of the chase, he should 
not have allowed it to be cut off. We have now been tacked on again ; 
and so far as this celebration is concerned, are proud to be part and 
parcel of the " Empire State of the South ; " but until the next 
Centenary we propose to be " sovereign." We are proud, too, 
of our proximity to our sister, who was in her " teens " in the 
Revolution — a maiden of such glorious report ; and shall this day, 
as far as possible, shelter ourself under the aegis of her fame. 

But what are the incidents which we may commemorate as our 
own? A hundred years ago was the mid-period of the twenty 
years of English ownership of Florida. With the recession to 
Spain, in 1783, occurred the Treaty of Peace by which England 



810 .JUU NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

relinquished the colonies of the Revolutionary struggle. With the 
English occupation the sous of Spain departed, and English names 
became associated with localities and identified with the new period 
of our History. Along the coast, Hillsborough, Halifax, Bercsford, 
Rolles, and Beauclerck, revive the illustrious memories of the 
Mother Country, that were shining lights in the eveuing horizon 
of the Eighteenth Century, crowning the north pinnacle of the 
pyramid with the sweet name of the Princess Amelia. Oliver 
Goldsmith had made the colonization by Oglethorpe the theme of 
the " Deserted Village," which completed his fame in 1770, mor- 
bidly condoling the sad fate of the exile voyagers to Frederica 
and the Altamaha. 

" Through torrid tracts with fainting steps they go, 
Where wild altama murmurs to their woe. 
Far-different there from all that charmed before, 
The varied terrors of that horrid shore. 
Those blazing suns that dart a downward ray; 
And fiercely shed intolerable day ; 
Those matted woods where birds forget to sing, 
But silent bats in drowsy clusters cling. 
Those poisonous fields with rank luxuriance crowned. 
Where the dark scorpion gathers death around ; 
Where at each step the stranger fears to wake 
The rattling terrors of the vengeful snake, 
Where crouching tigers wait their hapless prey ; 
And savage men more murderous still than they ; 
While oft in whirls the mad tornado flies, 
Mingling the ravaged landscape with the skies. 
Far different these from every former scene, 
The cooling brook, the grassy-vested green, 
The breezy covert of the warbling grove, 
That only sheltered thefts of harmless love." 

Such is the description given by Goldsmith of the primeval groves 
under whose very scions we now celebrate this day. Well might 
Dr. Johnson, his cotemporary and companion, while he honored 
the genius of the writer, ridicule the historical delineations of his 
pen. 

Sir Joshua Reynolds, the bosom friend of Goldsmith, was giving 
10 canvas, while Goldsmith was writing, his distorted fancies of 



ORATION — HON. COLUMBUS DREW. 811 

Georgia and Florida scenery ; and Burke, another friend, was ut 
tering his first fulrninations against the oppression of the Colonics. 

Bartram, the botanist, leaving the garden of his father on the 
Schuylkill, where now the world is celebrating America's Centen- 
nial epoch, was exploring the St. John's. He launched his boat 
for his river voyage on the very spot on which Jacksonville now 
stands, then the virgin forest, and the asserted domain of Micco 
Chlucco, the Long Warrior. 

In the garden on the Schuylkill, fostered by the munificence of 
the Crown, as a Colonial nursery of botanical science, the Bartrams 
lived when the storm of revolution broke, and its shades were 
sought by the congenial spirits of Washington, Franklin, and 
other worthies of the struggle. 

These are names and incidents which entitle Florida to a niche 
in that hundred years expired which, like the coral temples of the 
ocean that surround her, rise mysteriously and sublimely into the fab- 
ric of history. 

It may be said, without much strain of poetic license, that the 
ocean waves which break upon the beach of the beautiful St. John's 
leap from the snowy shores of Cumberland Island. Dungenness 
is there ! The home of Nathaniel Greene is there ! He sleeps not 
there, and the silent stars that watch over the noble and the good, 
if they single out the heroic living or the heroic dead, to assign to 
each aguardian of immortal destiny, only know where now he sleeps. 
His home is there, if his memory has a home on earth ; for the 
olive-trees that cluster there, sweet emblem of a nation's peace, 
may have been planted by his hand, and the shade that lingers 
over the tablet to his name be the spirit-vigil of his rest. 

Proud architect of a nation's liberty and honor ! Builder of a 
home for Freedom's rest! Well mightest thou, when the din of 
battle is over, and we can contemplate, 

"Our bruised arms hung up for monuments," 

have planted the shadow of another home more typical of that 
celestial rest which now is thine ! Born in another sea-girt gem, 
Rhode Island proudly claims his birth-place, and the island chain 
that almost joins the two extremes, hung upon the breast of a con- 
tinent, is a precious necklace of emerald beads, which memory 



812 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

counts from year to year as the sweet pastime of its cloistered 
sanctuary. 

What more precious could bind a nation together than the chain 
which memory thus retains ? Meet that in the lapse of a century of 
years, a nation's tears should moisten and make that garland fresh 
— fresh as the flowers of the cradles or the olives of the grave in 
which Greene slept and sought eternal sleep ! 

In the graveyard at the Dungenness rest the remains of Henry 
Lee, of the Revolutionary Army. Friends in life, friends in the 
dark hour of their country's trial, if they sleep not together in 
death, the names of Greene and Lee are associated with the spot — ■ 
the one preparing for himself there a last resting-place, the other 
resting, it might almost be said, in the grave his friend had before 
prepared ! 

In failing health, after the close of the Revolution, General 
Henry Lee repaired to the West Indies, and in 1818, with strength 
scarcely sufficient to reach his Virginia home, he crossed in a small 
vessel to Dungenness, and was there received by Mrs. Shaw, the 
daughter of Gen. Greene. He died shortly after his arrival. His 
son, Gen. Robert E. Lee, writing in 1869, mentions some account 
given by Mrs. Shaw of his last moments. 

" One incident is worth recording, as showing how his venera- 
tion for Washington, and his fondness for expressing it, clung to 
him to the last. A surgical operation was proposed, as offering some 
hope of prolonging his life ; but he replied that the eminent phy- 
sicians, to whose skill and care during his sojourn in the West 
Indies he was so much indebted, had disapproved a resort to the 
proposed operation. The surgeon in attendance still urging it, 
his patient jiut an end to the discussion by saying, ' My dear sir, 
were the great Washington alive and here, and joining you in 
advocating it, I would still resist.' After this he sank rapidly, and 
his last effort at communication with this world was to send a 
message to his son, C. Carter Lee." 

Doubly consecrated in the heart of every American be the spot 
redolent with these illustrious memories ! Over the grave of Lee 
and the Tablet of Greene, the North and the South join hands to- 
gether, not as over a bloody chasm, but as over the sealed grave 
of patriot brothers, upon whom the earth closed to know no open- 



ORATION — HON. COLUMBUS DKI'.W. 813 

ing till the resurrection morn. The South and the North may- 
say these jewels are mine. The fields on which they shone re- 
splendent are mine ; on this Centennial anniversary Bunker Hill is 
mine, and York town is mine ; and when the haze of a distant 
future softens the asperities of the present time, may each assign 
our fratricidal strife to the Nemesis of nations, and say the brave 
who were decreed to fall are mine ; the magnanimity of the con- 
queror and the heroism of the conquered at Appomatox are mine ; 
and pouring the balm of peace upon the land, say " Gilead and 
Manasseh are mine " also. 

It may be, in that distant future, the flag that Lee surrendered 
will be spoken of, like the soul of Bayard, " without stain and 
without reproach ;" but no man will seek to flaunt it as the emblem 

of a nation. 

" True, 'tis gory ; 
Yet 'tis wreathed around with glory. 
And will live in song and story, 

When its folds are in the dust, 
And its fame on brighter pages, 
Penn'd by poets and by sages, 
Shall go sounding down the ages, 

Furl its folds though now we must." 

True to the victorious banner to which Lee pledged his faith 
when the sun of the Lost Cause went down — a glorious banner, 
the stars of which were the cynosure of his father's eyes — let us 
always endeavor to rekindle the fire of patriotism when the em- 
bers are dying upon the altar, that there may be a pyramid of cen- 
tennial spheres, so true and perfect in their rounded form, that no 
shock can disturb their well-poised elevation. 

On its top may the emblem of our new nationality be forever 
planted, and as the American flag may it ever deserve the apos- 
trophe of a people's gratitude. 

"Flag of the free heart's hope and home, 

By angel hands to valor given ! 
Thy stars have lit the welkin dome, 

And all thy hues were born in heaven. 
Forever float that standard sheet ; 

Where breathes the foe that falls before us, 
Willi Freedom's soil beneath our feet, 

Ami Freedom's banner streaming o'er us !" 



814 OTJIt NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

And as a Christian nation, looking at the symbol without the 
substance as a paltry toy, may our flag be as the rainbow in purity, 
the type of that scroll which shall be unrolled when all things 
sublunary shall have passed away. 

"The banner that Thou hast given to them that fear Thee." 

The floral and vegetable world abounds with emblems of tender 
and beautiful sentiment. May the Eucalyptus tree, newly plant- 
ed on our shores, be hereafter the emblem of our new national life. 
Its strong branch is the type of our central union ; the twin leaves 
pointing to the south and to the north, to the east and to the west, 
in exact equilibrium, clasping the trunk as if unwilling to trust 
themselves to the frail stem which holds the foliage of common 
nature, resemble the States in their dependence upon each other 
and upon the central stock. Wound the branch, and the leaves 
will curl themselves back upon it as if to heal the wound ; punc- 
ture one leaf and you wound another. All delicate and nicely 
poised, may the sons of America, the guardians of the Eucalyptus, 
be the last to strike at its vitality. 

To the Jacksonville Light Infantry is due the credit of inaugur- 
ating the celebration of the Fourth of July of 18C0, the last com- 
memoration of that day in Florida previous to the collision of the 
States, as this is the first which follows it. As a body of citizen 
soldiery, none were more alive to a sentiment of veneration for the 
past than they. Most of them have been called to " cross over 
the river to sleep under the shadow of the trees." Disturb them 
not by a harsh tread. Let no discordant note awake them. They 
sank to their slumber as true men, after the battle of life was over, 
and the firemen of to-day are proud to stand as sentinels over 
their sleeping forms. 

To the firemen of Jacksonville belongs the honor of initiating 
this celebration. 

May the fireman's trumpet this day utter no loud note of com- 
mand, as in the hour of danger, but may it speak, as with a voica 
of music, the invocation — 

Come to the Altar of Freedom once more ! 
Come from the midland and come from the shore, 
Come from the prairie and come from the main, 
Come to the shrine of our Goddess again ! 



THE FIEST CENTURY DAY OF THE NATION. 

AN ORATION BY COL. GEORGE FLOURNOY. 

DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION AT GALVESTON, 
TEXAS, JULY 4:TH, 1S7G. 

The sentiments evoked in commemorative celebrations are grati- 
tude and affection — gratitude to Providence for the blessings con- 
ferred in permitting the successful accomplishment of great events, 
and an affectionate appreciation of the genius, heroism, fortitude, 
self-denial and other virtues exemplified in the conduct of actors 
amid great occasions, often glorified into an earnest love of somo 
great truth, the soul of action, giving strength and beauty and 
immortality to the victory of success in the triumph of the present, 
or the victory of martyrdom in the conquests of the future. 

There is nothing in the experience of man older or more natural 
than the custom of recalling these motives of gratitude and affec- 
tion — a custom always encouraged by the wisest statesmen and 
philosophers as tending to elevate the character and inflame the 
patriotism of nations. Some such occasions are even of Divine 
origin. One day of the seven — the seventh or the first — with 
Hebrew or Christian, has since the miraculous interview on the 
summit of Mount Sinai, been religiously observed, in memory of 
the completion of the creation. It is possible Abraham may have 
celebrated it long before the commandments were given to Moses. 
It is certain the Egyptians feasted on the harvest anniversary of. 
Isis, and annually displayed the most splendid pomp and pageantry 
of funeral ceremonies in commemoration of the death of Osiris, 
long before Joseph was sold by his brethren ; before Cadmus had 
ventured to the then unknown shores of Greece, and before the 
ancestors of Priam had located on the plains of Troy ; long before 
the wrath of Achilles became enshrined in the genius of Homer. 

The anniversary festivals of Greece have been called a compend 

816 



81G OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

of hex history. "What in a religious sense is Christmas to the Chris- 
tian, and the flight of the Prophet to the followers of Mohammed — 
so in political significance was the anniversary of the union of At- 
tica under Theseus to the Greeks — the feast of the foundation of 
the city to the Roman — and such is the Fourth of July to us. 

The readiest suggestion is to indulge an epitome of our history 
for the past hundred years. But it is not compatible with the 
interest or the duty of the hour to attempt even the briefest sum- 
mary of the great names and the great events that have crowded 
themselves into the short period of our national existence. The 
details are in the hands of every school boy. It is enough to say 
that when the Declaration of National Independence we have just 
heard read was signed, and became a living pledge to humanity, 
the people of the thirteen colonies were (in a political sense) but a 
mere handful, in national admeasurement. Now, after the laj3se of 
a single century, not yet beyond the ordinary childhood of political 
life, America may safely challenge the championship of nations. 

This is the year, day, and the first century-day of the American 
people (I do not now discuss those views illustrating in domestic 
economy the difference between a government of the people and a 
government of the States). But comprehending that at last the 
government, whether State or Federal, is, and of necessity must 
be, a government of the people, I call to-day the birthday of the 
American nation. This alone should make it worthy of memory 
and elicit in its celebration a just pride of the people. But there 
is something loftier and holier than this in its memories. 

To-day one hundred years ago the representatives of the people 
of the colonies gave utterance in solemn council to a political 
dogma — heretofore unknown — then utterly at war with all accepted 
theories of statesmanship, and defiant of the ingenuity of political 
casuists, and the previously established doctrines of sound govern- 
ment. 

There was something more than genius in the conception, 
something more than boldness in the promulgation, of the great 
idea that true government should no longer recognize those who 
administered it as free agents. That it was and should be, essen- 
tially and in all particulars, but an expression of the popular will. 
That government should and must originate in the will of the peo- 



ORATION — COL. GEORGE FLOURNOY. 817 

pie, depend upon their consent for its powers and existence, and be 
subject to alteration or abolishment at their pleasure. 

The halls of political thought had never before echoed the com- 
plete conception of such a doctrine — a government of tbe people, 
by the people and for the people. 

The inauguration and establishment of this dogma is the inflam- 
ing cause — the soul of the celebration we make to-day. 

These occasions, as before stated, are but expressions of con- 
tinued gratitude and affection. Gratitude to God for inspiring our 
forefathers, those sturdy patriots of a century ago with the ca- 
pacity to conceive and the courage to declare this great doctrine as 
the palladium of their liberties and affection for the memories of 
those who pledged their lives, their fortunes and their sacred honor 
to preserve and protect, and of the memories of all those who, 
either in the cabinet or on the field, aided in fixing firm the founda- 
tions and raising in exact proportions the splendid structure of 
government wherein we' dwell in peace and security to-day. 

But beyond this — not in forgetfulness of, but superior to, while 
linked with the memory of men and events — is an earnest love of 
the great principle of true government, announced one hundred 
years ago, still the essence of all politics and the declared creed of 
all parties. 

Who are those who thus celebrate to-day ? Americans. A 
nation cosmopolitan in origin. All of whom were a short time ago 
foreigners — invaders and conquerors of the hunting grounds of the 
wild children of the forest. The American is from every quarter 
of the globe. He is cosmopolitan in origin. In sentiment, in in- 
terest, in destiny, he is American. He may have brought to these 
shores a commendable love of his ancestry and a laudable pride in 
the national renown of his native land. He may and justly dees 
love the memory of those who, amid the scenes of his origin, 
achieved greatness in the various departments of hiynan effort, and 
of human ambition. There may justly cluster about his heart the 
warmest and holiest affections for the mellowed and glorified past 
that halos the tombs of his ancestry. But here he voluntarily es- 
pouses the present and the future. 

A citizen of America — and the scgis of its laws protects him — 
he prospers with her prosperity, or suffers amid her misfortunes. 



818 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE; 

His life is to end — his bones are to rest here. 

The fruit of his loins are to thrive or perish on her soil and he 
must therefore love her above all other lands ; whatever the prin- 
cipal or accessory motives leading individuals to congregate on 
American soil. The clear, pronounced and sacredly preserved po- 
litical idea is that each citizen is, here, an integral part of the 
government. That the government belongs to him and not he to the 
government. And that its success and its perpetuity, or its failure 
and destruction depends absolutely on the people themselves. 

While the American is cosmopolitan — while he may and should 
have sentiments of love towards the thousand and one places of 
his origin, it is probable that the citizen of no clime upon earth so 
loves the institutions under which he lives, or feels so just a pride 
in them. 

The love of an American for his country is not because of pride 
in her successful achievements of excellence, in the usual line of 
energy and ambition. It is not for the glory of her martial deeds 
or the especial excellence of her great soldiers. 

She has produced no Alexander, nor Cyrus, nor Caesar, nor Na- 
poleon, nor Frederick. 

Her orators are not Demosthenes and Cicero, and Burke and 
Chatham, and O'Connell and Mirabeau. 

Her poets approach not the splendor of Shakespeare, nor Dante, 
nor Tasso, nor Goethe, nor Schiller. 

Her philosophers compare not with Aristotle, nor Bacon, nor 
Bossuet, nor Balmes. 

She has produced no such satirist as Swift in the past, or New- 
man in the present. In painting and sculpture she but emulates 
higher art. 

The love of and pride in America by her citizens is not, there- 
fore, in the glory of her great names in war, in poetry, in philoso- 
phy, in the fine* arts. It is in the love of recognition of the right 
of the people to self-government — the mud sill of her institutions 
— from which spring and flourish this pride and love, and it is a 
just pride and should be a faithful love. 

The protection and perpetuation of the American idea — at once 
the impulse and the result of the Declaration of Independence — is 
assuredly the highest political aspiration of humanity. 



ORATION — COL. GEORGE FLOCRNOY. 8lC 

Like all blessings and privileges conferred upon man, we must 
prove worthy of this or it will depart from us. A great blessing 
always involves a corresponding duty and responsibility to cherish 
and preserve it, and transmit it to our posterity, as if lias been re- 
ceived and enjoyed by us. In a government of the people like 
ours, the responsibility is personal to each citizen. Each one 
speaks in a mandatory voice in the formation, the construction and 
the administration of her laws. And even though he would 
be speechless, still he must speak. Silence is the voice of 
action, when those who act express the will of all. No man can 
avoid the responsibility. This is the precise matter fitting for our 
consideration on this century day of American independence and 
free institutions. 

You (I mean the people, cadi and all) make the laws intended 
for your protection and advancement. You construe them ; you 
execute them, or it is yon who fail to do it. 

The government (meaning those who represent us in making and 
administering the laws,) is merely our agent expressing our will 
(or should express it), or held accountable for not doing it. In 
framing the popular will and giving it expression in action, each 
citizen is personally responsible. 

If bad laws are enacted, be lias enacted them, because he speaks 
through the voice of the law-making power. If they are unjustly 
administered, he so unjustly administers them, because he selects 
his own judiciary. If the executive arm, high or low in office, is 
weak, or hesitating, or vacillating in the execution of the laws, in 
protecting life and property, in punishing criminals and preserving 
the public peace, he has failed to impart to it the moral nerve and 
vigor needful to the full exercise of its powers. In a word, if the 
American government fails in its great and sole purpose to secure 
life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, it is we who have failed, 
we who have not come up to the full measure of our duty and re- 
sponsibility, because we are the government, and we have not pre- 
vented or rebuked malfeasance in office. Each complaint of non- 
administration or maladministration of the laws, should elicit 
prompt and earnest inquiry from every citizen. 

No citizen of Texas, of the United States, can find a reasonable 
excuse, whatever his position or calling, either upon a pretext of 



820 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

duty or interest, for failure to feel a solicitude in all political topics, 
and especially in the selection of those of high or low degree who 
are to represent him in administering the government. 

Whatever our predilections or business occupations, it is a high 
duty and important privilege that we should, each one of us, inform 
ourselves on all questions of public importance, have convictions, 
and give them expression on all proper and needful occasions. 

The will of the people is the supreme law, and by deduction the 
will of each individual is a part of that supreme law. It was an 
earnest faith in the patriotism and manhood of the people, that had 
its first expi-ession in the Declaration of Independence, and is the 
foundation of our structure of government. In the illustration that 
this faith was not misplaced, we have prospered to unparalleled 
national greatness. It is this that is the glory of our past, the 
security of our present and the prophecy of our future. 

Thus far in our history, while we have experienced the full of 
the rancor of party strife, while we have had days of prosperity 
and misfortune alike, and undergone the severest experience of 
civil conflict, still it has never been less than the creed of all parties, 
amid all conditions. That the will of the people (under our form 
of government) is, and should be, the supreme law of the land. 

That our theory of government has not yet practically illustrated 
its perfect workings, is most true. The cause is equally patent. 
The failure to protect life and liberty and the public peace, while 
it may not always originate in the apathy of the people as to pub- 
lic affairs and the conduct of those in official life, this condition is 
never continued for any length of time, except permitted by the 
indifferences of the people and their tacit consent that those who 
represent them in official life may act in utter disregard of the pub- 
lic weal, or illustrate a contemptible moral timidity, that is worse 
than a disregard of public order and security. 

Unfortunately, throughout the United States, the recent years 
have developed a growing tendency to viciousness in the criminal 
— a large increase in the numbers and enormities of crimes — a 
feeling among good citizens that life and property are not so secure 
as they should be. 

You — the people — are yourselves responsible for this condition 
of things, or will be responsible if there is not speedy change. 



ORATION — COL. GEORGE FLOURNOT. 821 

It is probably, in a great measure, because a large proportion of 
our fellow-citizens habitually feel no concern in public affairs ; and 
further, feel and express a contempt for those who do take an in- 
terest in political matters ; because they are indifferent as to what 
laws are passed, and never annoy themselves as to how they may 
be partially construed or tamely executed. And, strange to say, 
some of our wealthiest, most honorable and influential citizens, con- 
tinually illustrate this want of interest in public affairs. 

So absorbed are they in their particular pursuits that they have 
no time to cultivate an interest in the government under which 
they live, and upon the proper administration of which depends the 
security of their lives, liberty and property. 

De Tocqueville, in his work on American democracy, says that 
the capacity of our government to execute the law depends on a 
traditional respect for the constable, meaning, perhaps, that so 
long as the people were not entirely indifferent to, or ignorant of 
their rights and duties, so long as they remembered that the laws 
are made by them, and their faithful execution necessary to their 
protection, just so long will our government survive, and no longer. 
While there is cause for solicitude, there is nothing in our history 
to create despondency, nothing to shake our faith in the political 
sagacity and foresight of the fathers. Reforms must often be 
necessary in the administration of all governments. Here they 
are the peaceful result of enlightened popular inquiry and the 
silent rebuke of the ballot. TVe are now in the midst of great 
reforms. The declared purpose of all political parties being to re- 
form abuses in the public administration of the law, to punish 
crime in high or low places, and to secure the liberties, the prop- 
erty and the peace of the people. 

This but illustrates that, while for a time crime, and fraud, and 
dishonesty may be common in public and private life — while, for a 
season, popular indignation may wait for popular experience to 
evince the effect of the failure of courts and juries and the exec- 
utive officers to enforce the laws provided for the public safety — 
still there is always a restraining sober second thought of the peo- 
ple, springing from the instinct of self-preservation, and directing 
action to the perfection of needful reforms. 

There is no reason to believe that the American government will 

52 



822 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

ever cease to be the highest political blessing to the people, until 
their apathy, indifference or demoralization shall destroy it. 

It should be our highest and holiest political aspiration to trans- 
mit to our children the great inheritance we have received from the 
fathers — political and religious freedom. And let it never be for- 
gotten that he who assails either destroys both. Let the political 
right of suffrage and the private right of conscience be alike inviolate. 
Who would, by law, whatever the specious pretext, interfere in the 
least with these things, defdes the " Ark of the Covenant" of liber- 
ty. He speaks in the voice of Jacob, and he presents the hand of 
Esau ; and the birthright of liberty is in jeopardy. 

If we do our duty in the work of pursuing the American govern- 
ment, and the great principles of that government, if it shall, as I 
trust it will, be perpetuated by the partriotism aud intelligence of 
the people through another hundred years, what imagination can 
picture the political grandeur to which our descendants will at- 
tain ? 

"When the purchase of Louisiana was pending, in 1803, in the 
United States Congress, John Randolph of Roanoke, the political 
Hotspur and enthusiast of that age, startled public credulity, and 
excited a smile among his compeers, by venturing the prediction 
that before the expiration of a century from that time there would 
be social and political organizations of Americans west of the Mis- 
sissippi ! ^Xow, within three-fourths of that century we have a magnif- 
icent empire peopled with an energetic and prosperous citizenship 
throughout the then Western wild. The then unvisited slopes of 
the Pacilic now teem with unparalleled wealth, and the valleys of 
the Rocky Mountains and the plains of the great desert are the 
homes of a thriving and industrious race. Texas, then unknown, 
afterwards often imperiled, always traduced, begins to feel in her 
growing muscle the mastery of power, and in her youthful heart the 
glory and pride of empire. 

To-day, in the city of Philadelphia, where one hundred years 
ago our forefathers signed the Declaration of Independence, the 
people of the United States have gathered from every quarter of 
this immense territory to witness, at this jubilee of liberty, the 
friendly competition of all civilized nations, and to display their own 
handiwork for the inspection and criticism of an enlightened world. 



ORATION — COL. GEORGE FLOURNOT. 823 

To illustrate that, under our form of government the march of 
civilization has heen as rapid as the stride of empire. Let us, then, 
cherish gratitude to God, affection for the memory of the fathers of 
the republic, and earnest and faithful and watchful love of the prin- 
ciples of free government. May these sentiments be displayed in 
our every act as Texans and citizens of the United States. 

To-day, near fifty millions of people enjoy the results of the 
unparalleled resolve made by less than three millions a century 
ago. 

These fifty millions are not the fruit of military conquest, nor 
merely of natural growth, but in a great measure the spoils of a 
free government in extending the blessings of personal liberty to 
every man who seeks shelter under her flag. It is the growth 
accompanying the great republican idea of free government. 

So long as we adhere to this doctrine, thus long shall we enjoy 
prosperity and the blessing of Providence, because it is the leading 
political truth. 

May the Sun never witness a departure from the principles of free 
government by the American people. May each coming year enhance 
our prosperous growth, to the end of time, and the recurrence of each 
Fourth of July behold the increasing glory and renown of the patri- 
otic foresight of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, and 
of the patient, long-suffering and courageous men who maintained it 
and who transmitted to us the blessings that flowed from it. 



HUMAN PKOGKESS. 

AN ORATION BY REV. HORATIO STEBBINS, D.D. 

DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION AT SAN FRAN 

Cisco, cal., july 4th, 1876. 

Fellow-citizens of the Republic and of the Common 
wealth of California. — The great movements of mankind 
upon our globe, since it became the theatre of human life and 
human events, can never cease to be the .subject of profoundest 
interest and loftiest contemplation. "There is a spirit in man," 
urging him on with the strong momentum of eternal law, to a des- 
tiny that ever allures him with mystic wonder and • fascination. 
The earthly horizon of that destiny, ever retreating, invites him to 
the full and complete dominion of a world not yet subdued to intel- 
lectual and moral being. Generations, races and nations, inspired 
by impulse greater and mightier than themselves, move forward in 
grand consentaneous procession, and history unfurls her banners, 
the symbols of eternal jiurpose. 

One of the most sublime conceptions of which the mind is capa- 
ble, is the contemplation of the periods of time during which the 
earth was being prepared to be a fit habitation of man. Compared 
with these periods, the lifetime of the human race is but a moment, 
or a thought flashed by electric touch from city to city. The 
introduction of man upon the earth is a modern event, modern as 
the morning of to-day ! The Egyptian civilization is but of yester- 
day, compared with the formation of the delta of the Mississippi ; 
and the alluvial plains of the Euphrates, the first abodes of human 
society, were the work of cycles and axms of unrecorded time. 
These periods of time and preparation, in the contemplation of 
which the mind is oppressed with the vague sense of infinity, sug- 
gest, with striking intellectual and moral force, the importance of 
man's place in the scale of created things, and the rank he holds in 

824 



ORATION — REV. HORATIO STEBBINS, D.D. 825 

the order of being : — The last term in an ascending series, involved 
in all that goes before, crown and summit of creation, end and 
fulfilment of primal intent and purpose. Science unfolds the 
order of nature and reveals her method and law, but man, his 
fortunes, his deeds, his nature and his destiny, are the noblest 
objects of thought and study. He is superior to nature, in that he 
recognizes the law of nature and the law of his own being. He 
discovers truth, good and evil, and is haunted by the thought that 
not death, but increasing life is his goal. Progressive reason 
achieves new conquests in every age, and can never rest until it is 
established upon tbe throne of the world, and the sublime affirm- 
ation is realized. "Thou has put all things under his feet." Man, 
society, nationality, government, give, intellectual and moral import 
to a material universe, and the progress of history is the elevation 
of the moral character of mankind. 

The American Continent, earliest in geologic time of all the 
lands of the globe, was reserved to these later days to be the thea- 
tre of a new cycle of human culture, and a new display of the 
power of human society. 

The ancient oriental civilizations had flourished for thousands 
and tens of thousands of years, and sent forth those great migra- 
tions that founded the succession of Asiatic Empires, reared the 
fair forms of Grecian culture and the strength of Roman arms, 
made Europe the nursery of nations, and England the foster- 
mother of the modern world. Christianity, that religion which 
more than any other seems adapted to universal man, had kindled 
its holy signals on the hills of Judea nearly fifteen centuries before 
the Pilot of Genoa was born. Rome expired a thousand years 
before. During all these vast movements of mankind, and through 
these historic ages, when the soil of the world was being prepared 
to receive the seed of the Modern age, the American Continent 
lay concealed behind the horizon. The Ptolemaic system held tho 
viniverse in the thraldom of the senses, and religion, not yet allied 
to reason, enforced the thrall. The mind was enveloped in sense, 
and the sight of the eye, and the hearing of the ear, interpreted 
the world. The sun rose and set, and the earth was an extended 
plain. Imagination, strong angel of truth, had not looked with 
undazzled eye upon that inaccessible glory which the senses cannot 



826 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

touch. The outward manifestations of power filled the mind with 
vague wonder and fear, while reason had not yet discovered their 
law. It was the seed-time of history, the germinating period of 
human thought. 

It is now four hundred years since the European world hegan 
to feel those premonitory pains that go before the births of time. 

How the great ideas that now govern the world as the common 
thought of men first dawned upon the solitudes of genius, is beyond 
the power of man to tell. It is common to account for it in the 
intellectual law of suggestion or association. Accordingly, we are 
told that the apple falling from the tree in Newton's garden sug- 
gested the law of gravitation. But that is a mistake. The con- 
ception is in the mind ; the apple does not convey. It comes as 
the morning comes ; it comes as the ripening of the grain ; it 
comes as the flush of the vintage, distilled in mystery and silence — 
but behold, a new heaven and a new earth, without noise or fear ! 
The round world, as it lay in the serene imagination of Columbus, 
is one of the most striking illustrations of the power of an idea 
that history records. His heroism to obey the idea, and contrary ? 
to the opinions of his age, to follow it across the trackless deep, 
gives him an undisputed rank in the hierarchy of faith, and an 
immovable pedestal in the temple of earthly fame. Those masterty 
achievements of fidelity to a thought that characterized the dis- 
covery of the New World were fit precursors of the fortunes of 
that New World, destined as it was to be the field of new princi- 
ples, in which the majority of mankind did not believe. The birth 
of navigation may be said to have been simultaneous with the dis- 
coveries of the fifteenth century. Among the conquests that man 
has made over the obstacles that the barriers of the world offered 
to his progress, navigation must take first rank. It spans the 
awful abysses of the sea, makes the communication of nations and 
races possible, supplements human wants by the exchange of the 
varied products of the earth and of human skill, and tends by its 
mighty processes of intercourse and communication to establish 
the equilibrium of the condition of mankind. Navigation was the 
beo-innin"- of that system of communication upon the earth which 
is the striking feature of our own day, and makes man at home in 
the world 



ORATION REV. HORATIO STEBBINS, D.I). 827 

A true theory of the solar and planetary worlds had vaguely 
emerged from chaos, in the devout reason of Copernicus ; and the 
steady lights of the upper deep became the faithful guides of the 
trustful mariner, as he plowed the dark longitudes from land to 
land. Copernicus did not announce and defend his theory, lor 
fear of the Church, but his mind was the seed plot of the idea of 
modern astronomy, and was one of the powerful causes that con- 
tributed to the intellectual conquest of the material world at that 
period. When lying upon his death-bed, and near his end, lie 
united the expression of his devout faith and inspired intelligence 
in sentiments such as the sacred lyrist has embodied in his verse: 

Ye golden lamps of heaven ! farewell! 

With all your feeble light, 
Farewell, thou ever changing nioou — 

Pale empress of the night. 
And thou, refulgent orb of day ! 

In brighter flames arrayed — 
My soul, which springs beyond thy sphere, 

No more demands thine aid. 

The two ideas, one of a round world as it lay in the brooding 
mind of Columbus; the other, of the solar system as it dawned in 
the intelligence of Copernicus, were the sovereigns of that time. 

But there was a nobler moment yet. It may be summed up in 
that general and somewhat vague expression. The Reformation. 
In all the complex causes and relations which conspired in that 
event, the pith and quick of it was that it centered in man him- 
self, and concerned liis rights, his duties, his nature, and his des- 
tiny. The reformation was to man himself, what the round world 
and the solar system were to his conception of the material uni- 
verse. It was the free activity of the individual mind in fealty to 
eternal, moral law. It brought order into the moral world, by 
making the individual a centre of power. It abolished authorities 
imposed from without, and instated the perceptions of reason and 
conscience within. It appealed from the few to the many; from 
the priest to the people ; from the traditions of the elders to the 
mind and heart of man. It was not the revival of an old life, but 
the inspiration of the new ; the transfer of civilization to a new 
centre of development. The old system had completed its orbit; 



828 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

but that orbit was not the complete cycle of human progress, ever 
widening its range and rising higher and higher. Men are the 
unconscious instruments of powers, principles and ideas which they 
do not fully comprehend. They are the exponents of a period, 
but they do not originate its principles. It is a mistake to sup- 
pose that Martin Luther originated the Reformation, or that he 
was the father of it in any sense. The Reformation would have 
come if Luther had not been, and the moral grandeur of his figure 
in history is derived from his ability to discover the signs of the 
times, to read the horoscope of the period and confess the era of 
God. If you inquire for those mighty thoughts and sublime 
impulses, which are the seeds of human history, you ascend to those 
heights where genius o'ertops intelligence and insight becomes 
inspiration. The settlement of this continent by a strong and 
powerful race, who planted on these shores the seed of a new 
historic period, was the result of the Reformation. It was a 
movement that had its origin in the noblest moods of the human 
mind. Let no cheap animosities between Catholic and Protestant 
dim the clear, calm, historic vision ; let no jealousies of the pro- 
vincialisms of human feeling intrude themselves into that august 

© © 

presence. 

Among the men who contributed by force of moral genius 
to reduce the chaotic elements of that period to order and form, 
thus supplying the practical working materials of progress, there is 
one whose name and whose principles have been singularly asso- 
ciated with the origin and life of American institutions — I mean 
the lawyer, theologian, statesman of Geneva, John Calvin. It was 
he who gathered up the scattered moral powers of the Reforma- 
tion, condensed them in definite, dogmatic, popular forms, and ad- 
ministered the affairs of religion in a republican spirit, thus making 
his horribile decretum fateor the seed-plot of Republican liberty. 
If his doctrine was cruel, it was the offspring of a cruel age. It 
was not Protestant or Catholic that was cruel ; it was the con- 
dition of the human mind. That terrible doctrine, which now is 
like the nest of a former year from which the brood has flown, 
pervaded Christendom, and sent forth a mighty race that fought 
against tyranny everywhere, always sided with the people, gave 
victory to the plebeian Roundhead over the lordly Cavalier and 



ORATION— Kiev. HORATIO STEBBINS, D.IX 829 

sent forth a new Israel to take possession of this promised land 
of mankind and liberty. Calvinism was dispersed throughout 
Europe, and probably influenced more minds Mian any other sys- 
tem of doctrine or polity devised by man. Scotland was imbued 
with it and through her philosophy it tinged the thought of the in- 
tellectual world. The Huguenot stock of South Carolina inherited 
it. William Penn was taught by a famous Calvinist. The early 
Dutch colonists of New York were of that lineage, and the settlers 
of Plymouth were of that athletic race. 

The system of free schools was devised by Calvin's brain and 
heart, and beyond the boundaries of sect, his hand, unconscious of 
its power, scattered the seeds of Republican liberty. As our 
American Idealist has wove it into verse that shall vibrate on all 
the chords of time : 

" He wrought in sad sincerity, 
Himself from God lie could not free ; 
He bnilded better than lie knew ; 
The conscious stones to beauty grew." 

In the hard and thorny husk of a cruel system were hid the 
seeds of a new life among the nations, and a new era for man- 
kind. 

Thus the life of American institutions had its root in the Old 
World. The health of the scion attests the vigor of the native 
stock. Whatever may have been the exploits of former races on 
this continent, whatever power or glory their civilization displayed, 
they acted no part in the drama of the new era, and contributed 
nothing to the life of the new age. The traces of the mound- 
builders are a melancholy record of a race that we may gratefully 
believe fulfilled its destiny, and had no reason longer to be upon the 
earth. The native Indian — humble child of the forest, weak and 
passionate — dashes himself against the walls of the world, or dis- 
solves like ice flowing into tropic seas. American civilization is of 
European and English origin. It is a new centre of human cul- 
ture, from a seed matured in the highest and best experience of 
mankind. 

It must be confessed humanely speaking, that the union of the 



830 OUll NATIONAL JtTBILEE. 

American Colonies, first against foreign encroachment and then 
under a constitutional government, was a happy accident. But 
history distils wisdom and honor and power from human folly. The 
mad councils of George III. lost him his colonies, hut created a new 
nation. Had a hetter spirit prevailed, England might have been 
the mother of the Republic, or two Englands might have ruled the 
world. The independence of the American Colonies was brought 
about by those mixed causes, which, to the superficial observer, seem 
to be an inexplicable jumble of stupid blunder, blind folly and mad 
self-will. But to the philosophic historian, they are that apparent 
chaos of human events and human things over which the spirit of 
order ever broods, bringing forth the true, the beautiful and the 
good. Evil is never unmixed, and truth enveloped in error, falling 
upon the furrows of the world, expands, bursts its environments and 
buds and blooms. 

Doubtless there is much vague declamation and would-be philo- 
sophic gravity in talking about the " idea " of our government, or 
the " idea" of our institutions. There is probably no proper sense 
in which it can be said that Government has any idea or theoiy at 
Certainly the science of Government, if there is such a science, 
is not an exact science, and its principles are continually applied 
to new facts and new conditions, in a new method. The unfolding 
of a principal is a growth, not a mechanic law. Thus, in all enter- 
prise of man's affairs, in all administration of human things, the 
grand question is : Is it only a dead fact, or a living law? Ad- 
mitting fully all the limitations that practice sets to theory, still 
theory goes before practice, and includes practice. But the only 
theory or idea, which a free Government can have, is the growth 
and development of the principle on which it rests. This is the 
difference between constitutional liberty and absolute monarchy. 
The one is the arbitrary application of a rule ; the other is the un- 
folding of a principle. The one is a wooden fact, the other is an 
inspired truth. And thus in respect of ourselves and our historic 
origin, as a people and a nation, the question is, What was there at 
the bottom of this display of social order, that has so gone on 
where man nor angel never dreamed ? The early settlers of the 
Continent had no conception of it. They brought with them the 
mature fruit of human experience, the latest that hung upon the 



ORATION — REV. HORATIO STEBBINS, D.D. S.!| 

branches of the tree of life. That fruit was the conviction, nay 
more, transcending all reasoning process, the insight of inspired 
moral genius, that man's nature prefigures his liberty, and that lie 
is and must be free to act of himself under moral law! That con- 
viction, that insight, was new. The men themselves did not know 
what it meant nor where it would lead. And why should they ! 
A man cannot tell even what his house will cost beforehand, and 
why should they understand the vision of truth that had never 
been applied to the guidance and government of men? The world 
had been governed by force, invading even the recesses of thought. 
Prelusive powers and privileges were held and exercised by the 
few, and the idea of man as man had no place on earth. Even 
the Almighty Maker and Ruler had his favorites, and no long- 
minded eternities of beneficent power brooded over the destinies 
of mankind. One of the most influential races that has ever lived 
on the face of the earth, inhabiting a little country on the borders 
of the Levant, that the modern traveller can "do " in the saddle in 
five or seven days, made even religion aristocratic, claimed that 
God was their God, and that they were His people to the exclu- 
sion of everybody else. I am not indifferent to the historic develop- 
ment of opinion, nor to the influence of Hebrew Theism upon the 
destiny of the human world ; but it furnishes a striking illustration 
of the exclusiveness of human thought, associated as it commonly 
is with the monopoly of God and contempt for man. But truth 
mingled with error tends to work itself clear. 

When we talk about the theory of free government, we mean, 
if we mean anything, that the bottom of it is the principle of liberty, 
as it is elementary and fundamental in human nature. And like 
other principles, if it is a principle it is to be followed, and not to 
be led. If it is based upon the equality of men — that is, the 
equality of human nature— it is the affirmation that man every- 
where is man — made of the same powers, passions and affections ; 
that he has the same origin and the same destiny. The senses are 
the same in all ; intelligence is the same in all ; affection is the 
same in all ; reason is the same in all ; conscience is the same in 
all ; faith is the same in all. These may be developed in differ- 
ent degrees, and expressed in different terms, but they have their 
root in the same soil — of the same common nature. As I was 



832 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

riding the other day in the suburhs of the city, among the sand 
hills, that form so striking and hold contrast with the cultivated 
and powerful portions of the town, I met two children, who by 
their habit and manner, showed they belonged to the worthy, re- 
spectable poor. Their frugal, tidy dress, their unstockinged feet, 
their modesty in presence of a stranger, flushed the very sand with 
loveliness ; and in their little sun-burnt hands they held loosely a 
few flowers, such as Nature gives in her bounty to relieve her 
desert places; and they were comparing the colors, as the sunlight 
poured clown its golden rays and filled the urns of beauty. I said 
to myself, Behold the indentity of human nature ! The same love 
of the beautiful that fascinates the soul of a Titian or a Tintorretto ! 
This is what we mean by the equality of men, the identity of hu- 
man nature. This is the seed of human progress, and the promise 
of man's destiny. Our Republican Democracy is founded on that. 
It has always encountered suspicion and jealousy and evil fore- 
boding from those who are not imbued with it ; for if there are 
those who are too ignorant and wretched and benighted to be free, 
there are those, also, who are intelligent, yet who lack the moral 
genius to discern that they belong to the human race. 

The history of the country for the hundred years on whose 
summit we now stand, has been little less than the development 
of this principle. On these mighty waters the nation sails, and 
the horizon forever recedes and earth and sky never meet. 
Our principles, so far from being exhausted, are only beginning to 
be unfolded, and we may justly expect that they are to play a lead- 
ing part in the fortunes and destiny of mankind. If human pro- 
gress means anything, it means the enjoyment of the highest 
privileges and immunities of existence by all ; it means a fair field 
for every man to pursue that line of thought and action which his 
own individuality directs, and which, to him, is the purpose of his 
being. All truth is expansive, and greater than men think when 
they first adopt it. The smallest seed of liberty when it it is sown 
becomes a tree, and struggling human aspirations take refuge in its 
branches, or refresh themselves under its shadow for new 
resistance against ancient and venerable wrong. He who would 
confine the influence of free institution to this theatre of their 
display, would make a great mistake. The winds are its messen- 



ORATION — REV. HORA.TI0 STEBBINS, D.T). 833 

gers, the lightnings do its biddings, the ocean is its mediator. The 
heart of man, source of restless imaginations and never satisfied 
longings, aspires to it from afar. 

It would be impossible, on an occasion like the present, to 
recount the events, the deeds, the persons of this century of repub- 
lican liberty. That is the office of the historian, the philosopher 
and the poet. It is enough for us to-day to take counsel of our 
principles and reaffirm them as the profound conviction of our 
minds, attested by the experience of a century. It was announced 
a hundred years ago by the founders of the government that 
all men are free and equal. We have read it to-day from the 
famous Declaration, and it will be read by those who shall 
come after us down the rolling tide of centuries to the last 
recorded syllable of time. It is no contrivance of extemporaneous 
device ; it is no rule for the exigency of the moment, cheap subter- 
fuge of tyrants. It is in the eternal nature of truth, and tilings, 
and man and God. Neither is it any vagary or " glittering 
generality " in our minds, but of clear, decided import and energy. 
It is as old as the heavens, and as new as to-day, and we claim for 
it that immortality that belongs to essential truth. 

We affirm and declare to-day, as the fathers did in 177(i, that all 
men are free! And we mean by it that fundamental fact of 
human nature by virtue of which man is man, endowed by heaven 
with the power to choose between good and evil, and to direct his 
course towards those ends that seem to him best! We mean that 
the office of Government is to protect that freedom, and not to 
encroach upon it ; to throw around it the environments of law, 
that under law it may be liberty indeed ! 

We affirm and declare to-day, as the fathers did in 1770, that all 
men are equal ! Hear it, O Heaven ! and give ear unto it, Earth ! 
We mean by it the identity ot that nature whose inspirations 
of reason and conscience are the same in their eternal quality and 
divine essence ! We mean that reason is reason, that conscience is 
conscience, that imagination is imagination, and that the progress 
of mankind is grounded in this common nature of man. On this 
we base our hope of human progress, and our faith in human 
destiny. Does experience give any ground for that hope and 
faith. 

53 



834 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Human society on this continent for a hundred years has been 
led forth under the power of the principles which we affirm 
and declare to-day. A continent has been subdued to culture. A 
degree of external human comfort has been attained and enjoyed, 
that probably has not been surpassed in any portion of the earth, 
or in any period of history. Let us cheerfully accord whatever is 
due to the cheapness and fertility of the soil, but let us also be jnst 
to human energies. The results of scientific research have 
been applied to the arts of life, and whatever pertains to man's 
conquest over the material world has been made as complete here 
as in any other country. The area of the country has been extended 
by peace and by war until its borders are laved by both oceans 
through twenty degrees of latitude. The country to-day presents 
a theatre of world-grandeur for the display of free Constitutional 
Government. 

The affairs of the Government have been administered by those 
whom the people have chosen. Universal suffrage makes revolu- 
tion unnecessary, by giving every man the right to appeal to 
the ballot as the final remedy of all public wrong. We have 
never had under this plan a wicked or dissolute president, and 
if we ever had a weak one, the people have been steady enough to 
endure his weakness, conscious of their strength. We have never 
had a corrupt or mercenary Judge, and the judicial mind and ethic 
of the country, I speak firmly without boasting, compare favorably 
with the judicial mind and ethic of Christendom. The bad 
inheritance of slavery, bequeathed to us from the ancient estate, 
we esteem no longer a portion of the nation's wealth, and 
have absolved ourselves from its obligation by the blood of the 
sons of men. We have received from the nations of the earth 
and the islands of the sea, more than five millions of men, welcom- 
ing them to fairer opportunities. We have entrusted religion 
to the religious sentiments of human nature, without the inter- 
ference or support of the State, and the free contributions of men 
surpass the tribute of regal splendors. 

We have laid the foundation of a system of education for all, in 
making the public school free, and in making it secular. Its 
benefits are only beginning to be felt, but the mind of the country 
is awake, and we may expect the best results of a system that has 



ORATION — REV. HORATIO STEBBINS, D.D. 835 

an ideal excellence beyond any present practice. We live in 
obedience to order and law, without violence; and good feeling 
and good manners shed their invisible, mighty protection over all. 
American society has never required a standing army to enforce 
order upon the people. We feel that the Government is 
steady, because its base is broad — reaching to the freedom and 
equal rights of every man — and that, in the long run, the laws 
which the people make themselves they will respect. 

Governor ! please accept my respectful salutations and the saluta- 
tions of the people ! The occasion is worthy the presence of the first 
citizen of the Commonwealth. One hundred years ago the founda- 
tions of this city were laid by the ancient monarchy of Spain. It 
was reserved for another age and another race to carry for- 
ward the civilization which you now witness, and which you 
have the honor to represent. If the principles which I have 
rehearsed are true ; if the attainments that have been made under 
them are a just expression of their wisdom and power, we 
may take pride and gratitude in our citizenship, and renew our 
vow to the freedom and equality of men. Let mighty salvos pro- 
claim it ! Let banners wave in proud homage and triumphant joy ! 
Let the sea roar, and the fulness thereof ! Let us bid the future 
generations hail ! Hail ye happy races yet unborn that shall receive 
Buch an inheritance ! Let the people lift up their voice : Yea, let 
the people lift up their voice : Te Deum Laudamus. 



CENTENNIAL HYMN. 

BY T. J. SPEAR. SUNG BY MRS. BANTA. 

COMPOSED FOR THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION AT SAN FRAN- 
CISCO, CAL., JULY 4th, 1876. 

Oft the story has been told 
Of the battle-days of old — 
When our fathers took their stand 
Under Washington's command, 
And shouted from their tent, 
And their stony battlement, 
In courage and defiance, 
Trusting God for His alliance, 
For the freedom of the land, 

And the freedom of the seas, 
And the freedom of America 
For the coming centuries. 
Rejoice ! rejoice ! 

For the year of jubilee. 
Rejoice ! rejoice ! 

The Centennial of the free, 
That the States are all united 
And the Nation newly plighted 
To Freedom, Independence and Union ! 

A hundred years have flown 
Since their martial cry was known, 
Spreading higher still and higher, 
Like the sound of roaring fire, 
Warming patriots with its blaze, 
Cheering nations with its rays, 
In council and through slaughter 
Sending greetings o'er the water, 
For the freedom of the land, &c. 

What those sires have handed down, 
Lives in glory and renown ; 
And the banner they unrolled 
Has increased its starry fold, 
Till the gathering of the States 
And their new incoming mates, 
Is the topic now in order, 
From the center to the border. 
With the freedom of the land, &c. 

Thus forever may there be 
A glad story for the free ; 
As a fraternizing band, 
Guarding well their native land, 
Leading on to righteousness 
With their glory and success; 
Pledged to Truth and Education, 
And advancement of the Nation. 
With the freedom of the land, &c. 
836 



THE PERMANENCY OF OUR INSTITUTIONS. 

AN ORATION BY HON. C. K. DAVIS, EX-GOV., MINN. 

DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION AT ST. PAUL, MINN., 
JULY 4th, 1876. 

Op all the nations of the earth ours alone can commemorate such 
a day as this. The birthday of all of them excepting ours is lost 
in the mists of fable, obscured by transactions so equivocal that 
they have been falsified by history, or is so apochryphal in its 
character that the time cannot be fixed when independent life 
began. 

Like the Christian religion, our nation dates from a certain day 
— like it from that day dates :i new dispensation, like it from that 
day began an evangelization which finds no limits wherever the 
freedom of man is unsecured, and which like it has intensified those 
aspirations for better things yet to i:ome, which in every age have 
inspired the song of poets, the labors of statesmen, and the visions 
of political prophets. 

The origin of the old states, like that of the old religion, is veil- 
ed in mystery. The beginning of Buddhism is measured by the 
preposterous chronology of the Chinese empire. The origin of 
the Brahminical creeds is commensurate with that vast antiquity 
which the Hindoo nation claims. The fair and lovely forms of 
Grecian worship which speak distinctly, in exquisite forms of art, 
from a past of which nearly all else is dead, are coeval with the 
shadowy beginnings of the nation. 

The foundations of the Roman power are laid so deep in mytho- 
logic times that no one knows when the state began. The same is 
true of nearly all modern nations. They began in obscurity. But 
this laud, blessed with its century of life, can point back, like 
Christianity, to one day, and say, like it, on this day my life began, 
my mission was known from the circumstances winch attended my 
birth, my forerunners had cried in the wilderness to prepare the 

837 



838 OUR. NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

nations for my coming, my utterances have been a new political 
gospel, and while I come not to destroy, I do come to fulfil. This 
analogy involves something more than a fancied parallelism. The 
creed in this case has been the fact which made such a nation a 
possibility. For never until the perfect equality of man was pro- 
claimed as a matter of religious faith was such a republic possible, 
and the immense period which elapsed before the state grew like 
a consummate flower out of the creed, after many a growth had 
come up and died before its day of bloom, only proves how neces- 
sary the creed was to the result and how obdurate was the political 
idolatry which required eighteen hundred years for any effectual 
extirpation. Like the creed, so did the new state commence its 
life with a declaration of the importance of the individual — with a 
declaration of individual personal right. The creed saved not a 
nation collectively like the Hebrews, but mankind in detail and in- 
dividually. The formulated principles of the state enfranchised 
men not collectively as members of a certain tribe or state, but in- 
dividually as members of the great brotherhood of man of every 
race and condition. 

There is such an assurance of permanency in a nation so founded 
that the mere fact that it has existed a century hardly challenges 
observation. But almost alone of all the nations it is now what it 
was in its beginning. The young republic has witnessed changes 
in the venerable assembly of nations into which it entered full 
grown one hundred years ago. It has seen monarchy discrowned, 
hierarchy disrobed and spurious republics brought low. England 
is not what she was when her cruel maternity ceased towards us. 
The power of the crown has been abridged ; the liberty of the press 
has been secured ; the elective franchise has been extended ; the 
religious tests have been abolished ; in short, every principle which 
was then considered as essential to her existence has been aban- 
doned merely to copy the ideas which were the cause of the Amer- 
ican revolution. 

The kingdom of France passed away. The American revolu- 
tion was directly the cause of that fearful protest of personal right 
against the wrongs which for centuries the individual had suffered 
under the theory which makes the state everything and the person 
nothing in the scheme of government. The French republic, one 



ORATION — noN. C. K. DAVIS. 839 

and indivisible, came next in imitation of the one just arisen beyond 
the sea. By the law of reaction, the power of the individual was 
made so transcendent that there was in fact no state, and the result 
was that passions and resentments smothered for centuries broke 
forth with volcanic force and buried beneath their burning lava 
all law, all forms, all rights, and left a chaos. We saw that fleet- 
ing vision of glory and terror pass away. Then came the imperial 
pageant of Napoleon — as incongruous to our time as the triumph 
of a Roman conqueror — marching along the arena of history with 
suppliant kings in its train and encircling with the fiery zone of 
conquest peoples the most diverse, laying one sceptre over the 
land from the Biscayan bay to the Baltic sea. We saw that apoca- 
lyptic vision pass away like a cloud with all its blood-stained 
glories. We have seen other changes, until now, in imitation of 
what their ancestors helped on to establish one hundred years ago, 
a young republic, the mighty child of those efforts greets us from 
Finisterre. 

There is not to-day a state in Germany which remains as it was 
in 1770. Through revolution and short-lived republics, however, 
the rights of individual man have been extended to such a degree 
that the petty princes of that time who could sell their Hessians to 
fight in any war would not recognize their people or their institu- 
tions should they revisit the earth to-day. 

Spain has changed. The spiritual tyranny which reared its 
mitred front against every avenue of progress has passed away for- 
ever. Man has rights there now. She has been a republic. She is a 
constitutional monarchy. Her vast colonial possessions in the new 
world threw off her yoke long ago, and in imitation of the United 
States became republics, and have preserved that form of govern- 
ment through all the revolutions by which they have been dis- 
tracted. In this case our example has affected two continents, like 
that volcanic sympathy which, it is said, makes the remotest ex- 
tremities of the Andes and Rocky Mountains feel and respond to 
every convulsive throe occurring anywhere along that mighty spine 
on which the continents are built. 

Italy, too, that treasure-house of history, with all its models, ex- 
amples and warnings, which shows all that man has done in solving 
the problem of government ; which has enjoyed or has been afflict- 



840 OUli NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

ed with every form of state, the republic, the despotism, the hier- 
archy, in sympathy with what was done here a hundred years ago, 
has cast off her chains, has asserted the rights of individual man, 
has consolidated her people, and would to-day be unrecognizable by 
those who ruled her then. 

Turn the pages of history since 1776, and in the records of every 
state you will find transcripts from our own experience. All this 
has occurred not through armed conquest, but through that peace- 
ful means by which good and right always assert themselves and 
prevail against every obstacle which fraud or force oppose. 

Let us now gather the experience of the century which closes 
with to-day ; review in brief the progress with which it has been 
signalized, note with pride the instances in which the republic is an 
exponent, and, with emotions of repentance, the errors which we 
are committing. 

At the outset our fathers were compelled to be false to their 
principal conception of the equality of man. The fault was not 
theirs and they inherited a disease. The institution of slavery was 
entailed upon them. The slave ship, 

" built in the eclipse and rigged with curses dark," 

was not of their construction. They were impressed into its service 
by the cupidity of the mother country ; by the same cupidity which 
taxed them without representation, and which held that Magna 
Charta, the fairest and most perennial growth that ever sprang 
from the field of Runnymede was not transplanted to those bound- 
less areas of the western world, which freedom spread with cherish- 
ing hand and then veiled from the sight of man by ocean's watery 
curtain, until the age should come when her heirs, the human race, 
should enter full grown into their inheritance. 

That our fathers were not in this in advance of their age is not to 
be wondered at. It was an age when the distinctive lines between 
nationalities were very sharp and hostile, and particularly between 
types of mankind so opposed as whites and blacks. The laws of 
nations were rudimentaiy. The theory of the common law almost 
warrants the assertion that an alien was an enemy. The railroad 
and telegraph had not brought people of diverse blood together. 
Where now a few days will place the Saxon beside the Chinese m 
his home, where now you can place your ear to a small mechanism 



ORATION IION. C. K. DAVIS. 841 

in an office in St. Paul and hear the language of the Egyptian 
spoken at Alexandria on the same instant, there were then untrav- 
ersahle and incommunicable intervals. The idea of casting off 
allegiance and of naturalization was unknown. In short, every 
race looked out for itself and in that age of wars and reprisals it 
was a hard task. It is not wonderful therefore that our fathers, 
fighting, writing and speaking with ropes around their necks were 
oblivious that to a degree their example falsified their assertions. 
But their descendants were more recreant, and at last more faith- 
ful. They cried : 

" Evil, be thou my good." 

They made the exception the rule until the dark blot, so small at 
first, spread like the prophet's cloud, and flashed from its livid 
bosom the lightnings of war and national dissolution. The heavens 
were rent asunder ; the earth groaned beneath our feet ; the storms 
were let loose ; the chill northern gale met the southern typhoon 
and swallowed up thousands of homes and hundreds of thousands 
of men. In that dies irce of the nation, the nation's conscience was 
aroused. It armed itself with a scourge ; it sat in judgment upon 
its servants; it brought them to repentance through sorrow, crime, 
blood aud war upon land and sea, until the nation freed itself of its 
sin by an act of reparation, rose up regenerated and redeemed, and 
stood, the once fallen and now forgiven angel of liberty, her brow 
recrowned with a diadem of states, confronting the world, not one 
gem obscured. 

This was the second great test to which our people were sub- 
jected. The first was the oue which gave as its results our national 
independence. It was the revolt against monarchical supremacy. 
It is, however, the reiterated warning of history that it is easier to 
establish republics than to preserve them, and in all former times 
they have come to untimely ends. This is true of the ancient democ- 
racies. It was true of the Italian republics — they became over- 
loaded, and were corrupted by the wealth of merchant princes and 
great families until their independence was lost, aud they them 
selves, either changed to petty kingdoms and principalities, or 
were merged in the great empires of their time. It was true of the 
Dutch republic, which by gradual processes, by pressure and 



842 OUH NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

danger from without, by the ascendancy and contentions of great 
families from within, changed its form of government in sympathy 
with and to the similitude of the forms by which it was surrounded. 
The infirmity of their organization permitted the ascendancy of 
class interests, hereditary and transmissive, containing a force of 
conservation created by self-interest, which finally made the great 
families too powerful for the people. In other words, the great 
families became the oligarchy ; and popular rights, with individual 
interests, were finally subjected to the domination, of classes 
representing property, accumulation, refinement and hereditary 
ability. It was so with us. The seminal principle of evil 
which our fathers left in the institutions which they framed 
produced its like in due time. The class interest represented by 
slavery gradually narrowed its area, concentrated itself in the south, 
became more intense as it became more massive, changed from a 
skirmish line to a Macedonian phalanx, contracted as well its num- 
bers as its area, until some thirty thousand families represented 
four millions of slaves, eight millions of white people nominally free, 
but politically servient. These families in the course of two gen- 
erations came to represent great estates, and hereditary wealth and 
talent. They had their hereditary statesmen, their hereditary sol- 
diers, and were rapidly coming to have an hereditary clergy in all 
the religions denominations. There were the Masons, the Clays, 
the Poindexters, the Shelbys, the Lees, the Breckenridges, the 
Rhetts, representing transmitted wealth, culture, ability and more 
than all, a transmitted idea which became more typical in each 
generation — the idea of class supremacy. The north was dissimilar. 
It affords no such examples of great political families, excepting 
the Adamses, who are a marked example of entailed ability, purity 
of character, love of country, wealth, culture and ability, and this 
family since the death of the younger Adams, has been neglected 
by the purely popular and democratic communities in which they 
have so stubbornly and exceptionally survived. 

So that the struggle against slavery was not in its last analysis 
an effort to abolish a domestic institution. It was a battle with the 
second great danger which all antecedent republics had confronted, 
and before which they had fallen. It was a contest with that 
oligarchical element which had overthrown every predecessor of 



ORATION — HON. C. K. DAVIS. 843 

the American people. Hence it is right to say that the success of 
the nation is such a contest is our most assured warrant for its per- 
petuity. It is with the health of nations as with the physical health 
of men. When a disease which, like the small pox, has for senera- 
tions resulted in death or disfiguration is in one instance, as in that 
disease, subdued, mankind at large receives the benefit. The 
disease ceases to be fatal and universal immunity is secured. Thus 
was the only congenital defect in our institutions finally removed. 
That dangers still exist is true, but they are incident to any form 
of government. We may succumb before luxury, before the aggres- 
sion of capitalized and confederated wealth, but if we do, no one 
can say that these were defects in the original scheme. If I were 
required to point out the chiefest excellence of our fathers' work, 
next to that central excellence, the assertion of the equality of men, 
I should say that it consists in the fact, that the subjects of any 
king were enabled to become citizens of this country. This trans- 
formation of allegiance and of national character is now so much a 
matter of course that it is difficult to realize what a surprising 
innovation it was upon the old conceptions of untransferable alle- 
giance. Once a subject always a subject was the ancient maxim. 
It was an axiom. It was so fundamental that the right of search 
and imprisonment from American vessels, by which Great Britain 
brought on the war of 1812, was vindicated by that government 
upon the assertion that the theory of the American government 
that a subject could renounce and transfer his allegiance was one 
the truth of which could not be admitted, and when Aaron Burr, 
after having borne arms in the revolution, after having been vice- 
president of the republic which he committed treason to establish, 
took refuge in England after his duel with Hamilton, the govern- 
ment of that country, when it endeavored to treat him as an alien 
and to compel him to take his departure was met by the adroit 
lawyer with the assertion that by the common law he was still a 
subject of George III. Instead of admitting the force of his claim 
by trying 'him for treason, the authorities of that government ad- 
mitted its force by desisting from their threats to extradite him. 

The result of the establishment of the principle of naturalization 
was immediate, and it has continued to the present day, manifesting 
itself in many forms. People of every foreign state came to our 



844 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

shores. The baffled aspirant for personal liberty in every land, 
his tongue tied and his pen broken there, perhaps with a price upon 
his head, found refuge here. 

The yeoman who wrung from the soil of his fatherland reluctant 
subsistence, who was compelled to feed and clothe his family upon 
the residuum which exorbitant landlords left like crumbs upon his 
table, like rags to cover the nakedness of his body, who saw no 
future for his posterity better than his own and his father's weary 
and irreparable lot, who was liable to be forced into the ranks of 
wars not his own, which, in some instances, were merely the bloody 
resentments of the concubines of kings, knew that beyond the At- 
lantic, protected by its broad expanse, still better protected by the 
indomitable spirit of a people who had fought for their freedom 
and won it, was a land where these evils were not, where the future 
was broad and unpre-empted before him and his children, and 
where, above all — whether he had been noble, citizen, vassal, or 
serf — he could array himself in the panoply of citizenship, and 
have a voice in the enactment of the laws by which he was to be 
governed. There was not then, and I think there is not now, a 
nation on the earth by which such privileges are accorded. Even 
the ancient Romans with that marvellous and elective genius for 
affiliation by which they consolidated their conquests, failed to 
grasp to its extent this idea, so full of strength and so assuring of 
national endurance. They accorded the citizenship of the city not 
to peoples, but to favored individuals only, and that sparingly ; and 
even then not in the earlier days of the formation of their state, 
but only in the later time, when rot and decay had laid their dis- 
figuring fingers upon the walls of that colossal structure. 

For an hundred years this process of naturalization and assirni- 
lization has been at work, and we can now estimate its results. 

We have passed from a conglomerated to an assimilated people. 
We have become a typical people. The Englishman, the German, 
the Frenchman, the Irishman, the Scotchman and the Scandinavian 
have cast their lots among us. By association the sharp and pro- 
vincial angularities of national character have been worn away in 
the persons who are foreign born. More important than all, their 
descendants have intermarried, and the offspring of those marriages 
have combined in fortunate union the jjeculiar characteristics of 
each parentage. 



ORATION HON. C. K. DAVIS. 81;") 

This principle of naturalization and assimilation lias worked 
wonders in other ways. They who have come here from other 
lands have cast hack to their native place the light of their new 
experience. England has amplified the right of suffrage. France 
has made four attempts to establish a Republic and at last suc- 
ceeded. The voice of Castelar was heard the other day in Madrid, 
invoking from the councils of the deliberative assembly of Spain 
the blessings of Washington and Lincoln as the canonized saints of 
the new political dispensation. The political state of the Germans 
has been growing better for fifty years. The stolidity of the House 
of Hapsburg has been vivified until the advance of the Austrian 
people towards free education, free speech, free press, a national 
assembly has become one of the most marked features of the time 
in which we live. The Czar has emancipated his serfs. Gari- 
baldi, returning from our shores, poured the blessings of liberty 
over Italy, from Palermo to Rome, and from his island home looks 
with a father's eye upon the people whom he has disenthralled. 
Lafayette, forever blessed be the name of that knight of modern 
times — who fought for liberty as his youthful spouse, returning from 
his errantry, took up the gage for her in his native land — helped 
to rescue her, but instead of the fresh and faithful maiden whom 
God had made, took from Bastilles and quarries, and prisons and 
galley ships, a jaded, broken, frantic fury, driven mad, and all her 
glorious beauty ruined and brought low by ages of torture, impris- 
onment and defloration, who snatched the sword of her deliverance, 
and in her maniac wrath immolated her deliverers and then 
herself. 

Bolivar, one of the finest characters of history, set the standard 
of freedom in full view of a continent, 

" Where Andes, giant of the western star, 
With meteor standard to the winds unfurled, 
Looks from his throne of clouds o'er half the world." 

I know that it is claiming very much to assert the creative influ- 
ence of our example upon these great events which have swallowed 
up thrones and sent kings into exile. But had our fathers failed 
— had they, like Einmett, been brought to the scaffold and we 
remained the mere colonial appanages of a haughty and revengeful 



84G OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

conqueror, could one of these events have happened ? I think 
not. 

Let us now turn our attention for a few moments to the prin- 
ciples of conservation which exist in the Republic as we find it 
to-day and to some of the dangers with which it is threatened. 
The love of country is, of course, taken for granted. At the end 
of one hundred years that remains as ardent as ever. There has 
grown up since the beginning another institution which has become 
with the love of country a most powerful co-efficient in the per- 
petuation of national life. I mean the common school. This 
institution so republican in itself, this nursery of knowledge where 
the boy and girl of the rich man and the boy and girl of the poor 
man know no inequality is really the bulwark of all we enjoy. It 
is not so much the quantity of knowledge that it imparts, for the 
man survives much useless information with which his childhood is 
crammed, but it is the fact that the children of all the people are 
for years assembled daily at that plastic age when the most en- 
during impressions are formed that makes this factor of our 
prosperity so important. For this main reason I think we have 
carried the grading and subdivision of the common schools too far. 
It is a mistake to introduce distinctions of rank, beyond the rewards 
and the distinction which spring from merit in any pursuit, into 
those primary and essential functionaries of national existence. 

Great schools lie at the foundation of great States, and as the 
school is, so will the nation be. England has been subjected to 
more formative processes from Rugby, Eton, Harrow, Oxford and 
Cambridge than all the parliaments from the beginning have ever 
been able to work upon her. The aristocratic and select pupils of 
the schools have given more than aught else to the English gov- 
ernment its select and conservative form. "Woe to that nation 
which is governed by men who are scholars merely. There is a 
dangerous bigotry in learning. Essential as it is, yet it is unsym- 
pathetic by its very nature. Its processes are ironbound and 
absolute, and in their practical application often become tyrannical. 
A Scotch philosopher has exalted common sense into one of the 
great classifications of the human intellect with the will, imagin- 
ation and reason. If he failed to reach a metaphysical verity, he, 
at least, hit a political truth ; for in common sense, in that average 
of the judgment of the learned and the unlearned lies the tru© 



ORATION — HON. C. K. DAVIS. 847 

safety of such states as ours. It is the middle ground between the 
oligarchy and the mob. To produce that average common sense, 
the wit of man has as yet devised no such agency as the common 
school system of this country. There is also a danger to which 
in the beginning the country was not subjected. This everlasting 
and universal place hunting, which drives a man from productive 
employment into the train of some party, or worse still of some 
party leader, and converts him into a political janissary, dependent 
for his means of life upon the perpetuation of some other man in 
office, who is in his turn a parasite upon the body of some greater 
parasite, is something that the rising generation should be warned 
against. 

It was formerly thought that the Republic would fracture be- 
cause of the weakness incident to its great territorial extent. The 
pages of history are replete with the examples of great empires 
which have broken up their own tension. But that danger with 
us is obviated. The telegraph has annihilated time and made it 
a paradox — for messages sent westwardly are received earlier than 
their date. While as to space, the railroad has brought New York 
within seventy-two hours journey of San Francisco. 

Again there is no. fear of production pressing upon the means of 
subsistence and producing those dangerous classes which in other 
Jands are a standing menace against existing institutions. We have 
not drawn a tithe of the resources of this blessed land, so rich in 
soils, whose mines send their veins of wealth through every state, 
whose rivers reach from almost the sight of either ocean, and bear 
the wealth of temperate and tropic states to the sea on the bosom 
of one great stream. 

What have we to fear ? Nothing but ourselves. If we are 
mindful of that unvarying law that nations as well as individuals 
must do right, must not lie, must not steal, must not covet, all will 
be well with us and those who shall come after us. If we forget 
this rule, if we oppress the weak, if we spoliate the helpless, if we 
in our corruption wrong each other, if unrighteousness shall be exalt- 
ed in our councils, if the balance of justice shall be made false, we 
shall go like the discrowned monarchies of old into the Golgotha of 
nations, never to be stirred to life again. 

One hundred years ! How long the time ! How magical the 



8 IS OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

words ! No enchanter's wand, no poet's dream called up a vision 
so gorgeous and yet so solemn as the reality of which this is the 
closing day. A free people, free for a hundred years, have met to 
honor those who made them free. It is not too much to suppose 
that from Heaven itself the benignant spirits of Washington, Frank- 
lin, Adams, Jefferson, and all the rest are bending over us in solemn 
benedictions. From Independence and Faneuil Halls, from the 
Court House of Mecklenburgh, from Virginia's House of Burgesses 
reawaken the voice which one hundred years ago thrilled the world 
and whose echoes are now sounding and will forever sound while 
man has rights. Listen to their eloquence, swelling like an an- 
them in the great temple of Time, magnificently harmonious and 
triumphant with freedom's inspiration, carried on every breeze to 
every land, whispering freedom in the ear of slaves, thundering 
freedom in the ear of tyrants, and joining to the choral words, 
" We hold these truths to be self-evident — that all men are created 
equal ; That they are endowed by their Creator with certain in- 
alienable rights : among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of hap- 
piness ; that to secure these rights, governments are instituted among 
men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the government.'' 
And, if, in our time or in times to come, danger from within or without 
shall assail a single one of those principles, God grant that we, or 
who shall succeed us in this heritage of freedom, may say as your 
fathers said : 

" And for the support of this declaration, with a firm reliance 
on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each 
other, our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor." 



THE BOUNDED AGE. 

A POEM BY SAMUEL L. SIMPSON. 

DELIVERED AT PORTLAND, OREGON, BY HON. RUFUS MALLORY, 

july 4th, 1876. 

Unfurl the flag ! let the winds caress 

And lift it in rippling loveliness 

Over all the wide west-world we claim 

By cross and sword and in Freedom's name. 

From the peaks that gleam o'er Alaskan gloom 

To the isles of palm and the shores of bloom ; 

From the sacred rock where the seed was sown 

To the sunset capes where the flow'r has blown, 

O flag of the Union, toss and wave 

O'er millions of freemen and not a slave. 

Unfurl the flag ! let it curl and kiss 
The zephyr that faints in the summer bliss : — 
It was born in storm, and its glory sprung 
Where the bolts of battle shrieked and sung ; 
Through smoke and cloud it has won the right 
To float and flaunt when the days are bright. 
We know what souls in its white stars shine, 
And the blood on its crimson spilled like wine ; 
We know the strifes and the wars and fears 
That hedged it round for a hundred years ! 

Unfurl the flag ! we have followed far 
That mystical token of stripe and star, 
And borne upon many a field of dread 
Its streaming splendor of white ;md red; 

84U 



850 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

But now from the height of the struggling years 

It bursts like the dawn on a night of tears — 

A day-spring that flushes the farthest sea 

With a roseate pledge of the time to be — 

When the man shall be sovereign and freedom shall reign 

From ice fretted Neva to Neva again. 

God bless the flag! let it float, and fill 

The sky with its beauty : — our heart-strings thrill 

To the low, sweet chant of its wind-swept bars 

And the chorus of all its clustered stars. 

Embrace it, O mothers, and heroes shall grow 

While its colors blush warm on your bosoms of snow ! 

Defend it, O fathers, there's no sweeter death 

Than to float its fair folds with a soldier's last breath 1 

And love it, O children, be true to the sires 

Who wove it in pain by the old camp-fires ! 



I. 



The days are dim, the world is old 

And bleak with human dust and mold ; 

In plume and mail the bold knights ride 

To fray and tourney, scarf and sword, 

Love's sweet intrigue, the warrior's pride 

Rule king and courtier, liege and lord ; 

For war and love and lust of gold 

And gropings for the things untold 

Put many a lance in rest and stain 

The weary earth with gory slain. 

Kings come and go in tragic state, 

And crowns with sparkling jewels set 

In battle debris lie, and yet 

The round world wheels, and Time and Fate 

Touch hands and whisper, " God can wait ! " 

And still the despot's iron sway 

Strikes truth and genius in the dust, 

True hearts repine, great spirits rust, 



POEM— SAMtJEL L. SIMPSON. 851 

And high aspirings melt away ; 

From superstition's sable wing 

All midnight shadows fall, and fling 

A pall of terror o'er the land ; 

And Christ's dear cross, in struggle long 

Rocks to and fro above the throng, 

Borne on by many a bloody hand ! 

In old, old ways the ships sail on 

From mart to mart and shore to shore, 

And ever voyage o'er and o'er 

The sea-paths traced in ages gone ; 

And, wide and wild, Atlantic lies 

Untracked, unknown, beneath the skies 

That hover far upon his breast, 

And still his thundering surge is piled 

Along the Old World's weary strand; 

But never yet, by breezes bland 

Or any hope of gain beguiled, 

Has ship essayed the curtained West. 



II. 



A sail ! a sail ! three ships in line 
Steer blithely o'er the ocean rim ; 
The blue seas foam beneath each keel, 
Their black prows dash the beaded brine — 
They bear the flag of proud Castile, 
The sailors chant a Romish hymn ! 
Down the unknown and vasty world 
Of rolling waters rides the fleet, 
The white mists round the sky are furled, 
And fair winds fill the snowy sheet. 
Lead on, Maria ! reel and toss 
Into the wastes of wave and sky, 
An unseen hand leads thee across — 
Thy path is marked by God*s own eye ! 
Be true, O stately Genoese ! 



852 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Keep heart and hope whate'er befall ; — 
A lofty fate has thee in thrall, 
Fear not the strange storm-beaten seas ; 
The gold that clasped a queen's fair arms, 
The pearls that heaved upon her breast, 
And all the gems that graced her charms 
Are pledged to win the mystic "West. 



III. 

'Tis done. Three ships at anchor ride 
Before an isle of sun and song, 
And bare barbarians dumbly throng 
The rich and flowing forest side ; 
And still with child-like wonder gaze 
Upon a knight in courtly dress, 
Whose bearded lips the new earth press- 
And start again with quaint amaze 
To see him draw his sword amain 
And claim San Salvador for Spain. 



IV. 

1 look again. Long years have flown : 

A single barque with sullied sail 

And many a mark of wave and gale, 

Tacks in upon a pallid shore — 

All silent save the sad sea-moan. 

A boat is launched, with lab'ring oar, 

The voyagers, stern-browed and pale, 

Attain the strand, and kneel for prayer ; 

A wintry chill is in the air, 

And all the wan sky overhead, 

By films of frosty cloud o'er spread, 

Gives neither hue of hope nor sign 

Of living God or grace benign. 



POEM — SAMUEL L. SIMPSON. 853 

And yet these men of faith and song, 
Who flee from priestly rule and wrong, 
Kiss the cold rock on which they kneel 
And Plymouth's shrouded empire claim 
For One who holds a higher name 
Than Arragon or old Castile ; 
And lo ! the bleak woods, white and grim, 
Reecho their thanksgiving hymn, 
And stretch their hands in crystal mail 
To bid the sea-worn pilgrims hail. 



V. 



Another age. Long troublous years 
Have rolled into the silent realm ; 
The hand that held the Mayflower's helm 
Has long been dust, and scarce appears 
Mid Hayti's tangled vine and bloom 
The great Genoan's lowly tomb — 
And fields expand and cities shine, 
Along the New World's border line. 
"What scene is this ? A straggling town 
In green New England just as morn 
Chases the lingering shadows down, 
And loops her veil of silver-grey 
Across the gateway of the day. 
With restless doubts and fears foidorn, 
A half a hundred burghers meet 
Upon a dim and dewy street — 
And some have guns, and stand and load 
With furtive glances down the road. 
And hark ! I hear the measured tread 
Of martial ranks, Pitcairn ahead, 
And like a sudden burst of flame, 
The scarlet coats emerge in sight, 
Their muskets flickering in the light, 



851 OUR NATIONAL JUI5ILEE. 

And halt before their timid game. 
" Disperse, ye rebels ! " Pitcairn cries— 
But not a trembling townsman flies 1 
And then, a movement and a flash, 
And quick the leveled muskets crash, 
And here and there, a patriot falls 
Before the thunder shower of balls, 
The fight is o'er, the victory won, 
And freedom's battle has begun 
With the first blood at Lexington. 



VI. 



The closing scene. In Congress Hall 
The patriot chiefs are gathered all, 
This day a hundred years ago ; 
And bold John Hancock, rising up, 
Like one who waves a wassail cup, 
Lifts o'er his head, where all can see, 
The ringing ritual of the free. 
" And with his pen, jnst freshly dipt, 
Points to his own gigantic script, 
Which e'en our lisping children know ; 
" The King can read that name," he said, 
" And set his price upon my head ! " 
Honor to him, and let his name 
Shine forth as fair in deathless fame ! 
Honor to him, and God bless all 
Who sat that day in Congress Hall, 
And pledged their names and honor bright 
To stand for freedom and the right ! 
How well that sacred vow was kept, 
How well they battled side by side 
Through the long years when conflict swept 
The colonies with ruin wide, 
The starry banner's graceful play 
Proclaims in every wind to-day. 



POEM — SAMUEL L. SIMPSON. 85J 

And prouder than Achille's fame, 

Or any god's that Homer sung, 

Is still the high aspiring name 

"Whose glory ;ill the world has rung— 

Till every virtue 'neath the sun 

Is named in naming Washington. 

And oh, if from the silent bourn 

The pilgrim spirits e'er return 

To look upon the things of earth — 

May we not think that he, the first 

In war and peace, leads forth again 

His host on many a storied plain 

When freedom's infancy was nursed; 

And that they march and charge and wheel, 

"With soundless shot and viewless steel, 

Along the fields their valor won ! 

May we not think the summer air 

Is bright with legions hovering there 

To view the deeds that we have done ; 

And that 'tis not the wind that lifts, 

In starry waves and crimson drifts 

The banners blushing o'er the land, 

But 'tis the sweep of seraph wings, 

The claspings and the whisperings 

Of Washington's immortal band ! 



VII. 

Heaven's ways are dark, and men are blind, 
For they do only look behind 
And read results that compass all ; 
Though all the dusty ways of time 
Till o'er and o'er, in speech sublime, 
That truth must live and error fall, 
We know no more. ; but blest are they 
On whom God puts his hand to say, 
" The hour is ripe, lead ye the way ! " 



85G OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Through misty eons, dim and vast, 

In night and storm, the wrath and pain 

Of rolling floods and fiery strain, 

The fruitful earth came forth at last : 

And so this broad and equal State. 

To human freedom dedicate, 

Is but the flowers of ages long — 

Upspringing from a soil of wrong. 

What woes shall come, what conflicts dark 

Our future pathway yet shall mark, 

He only knows whose thunders jar 

The rhythmic circles of the sky ; 

But Dian's bow and th' shield of Mars 

Shall fall, and War's red passion die. 

Thrice blest are we whose kindling eyes 

Have seen this mighty day arise, 

And greet, through grateful smiles and tears, 

The banner of a hundred years ! 

When once again the planets wheel 

Their courses through an equal age. 

We, too shall sleep, with all the leal 

Whose patriot names grace history's page ; 

Yet sweet the thought that other men 

Will bear the same bright colors then— 

That in these skies of violet 

The stars of Union shall not set. 

Hail and farewell, O flag of truth ! 
Thy festal we shall see no more, 
But thou in swift, eternal youth 
Shalt brighten still, and proudly soar. 
Hail and farewell ! we pass to rest, 
But thou, in marching splendor drest, 
Shouldst tarry till time's debt is paid, 
'Till all the storms of war are laid, 
And great Orion's belt of gold 
Fades in the flame by seers foretold ! 



A WELCOME TO THE COMING CENTURY. 

A SPEECH BY GEN. NELSON A. MILES. 

DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION AT LEAVEN- 
WORTH, KAN., JULY 4th, 1876. 

Mr. President, Ladies and Gentlemen, — My friends, these 
are hallowed moments, when every American has reason to ex- 
press his most profound gratitude to Almighty God that it has been 
his good fortune to witness the light of this auspicious morn, that 
we can participate in celebrating one of the most important events 
in the history of this country, that we are permitted to register the 
close of one century of our national existence and" to herald the 
dawn of a new era ; to welcome the coming century, which we 
trust will excel the old in its record of human achievements and 
enlightenment. 

This is indeed an occasion in which the heart of every Ameri- 
can can but feel a conscious pride in our fathers' valor and politi- 
cal wisdom. One hundred years ago today a few brave and noble 
men in convention assembled, delivered to the world their belief in 
the practicability of self-government and enunciated principles of 
government that have given to the people of this country greater 
blessings, and to the world more beneficent influences than the 
action of any political body since the world began. The condition 
of this nation and people to-day is the fruit of their patriotic work, 
the wonderful progress and unprecedented happiness of the past 
century are but the result of their purity of thought, simplicity of 
life, and devotion to the welfare of their fellow-men. Those prin- 
ciples which were founded on God's law and man's rights could 
not perish, neither could they remain tranquil with the sparsely 
populated provinces of the Atlantic coast ; they soon swept over 
the Alleghanies, across the most magnificent and fertile valley of 
the world ; scaled that majestic range of mountains, whose mineral 
wealth will not be exhausted in a thousand years, and, finally, 

857 



858 OUR NATIONAL JUBILbE. 

planted its banners of light and liberty beneath the celestial skies 
of the Pacific coast ; reclaiming the wilderness from barbarianism 
to the most enlightened state of civilization, and to-day, we see 
about us the evidences of that civilization. With this centennial, 
time sets its enduring seal upon the purity and perpetuity of our 
form of government. This is, indeed, a sacred hour. As these 
celebrations have had the effect of cultivating loyal sentiments in 
the past, this celebration will add new life to the patriot fires that 
have burned so brightly during the past hundred years. The 
world has never witnessed a more magnificent, instructive and 
glorious scene, than the one being enacted on this continent this 
very day and hour. Could we but see our countrymen, far up in 
pine forests of the North, or the rice and cotton fields of the South, 
on these rich prairies and lofty mountains of the great West, we 
would behold our people celebrating one of the most important 
events in the history of the human family. In the dense metropo- 
lis, or the humblest cot in the land : from the hearts and lips of 
forty millions of America's freemen, there ascends to heaven one 
grand anthem of thanksgiving. Shouts of victory over prejudice, 
past animosities and internal discords, swell the gale, while the 
breezes are laden with the songs of gratitude for one hundred 
years of freedom, happiness and prosperity. Fortunately the 
people who accomplished this mighty work were not of one 
country, race or religion ; hence we can extend our influence and 
sympathy to all races and nationalities — to the people of all 
countries who are struggling for freedom and enlightenment ; and 
more especially do we extend our sympathy and congratulations to 
that grand and courteous nation, whose people one hundred years 
ago gave us material encouragement and support; neither do we 
cherish any feelings of animosity, but rather those of friendship 
and reverence for the people of that mighty empire that has done 
so much to extend the light of civilization throughout the world. 
And to-day we rejoice that " Britannia still rules the wave," while 
Columbia leads the world, in all that tends to make mankind wiser, 
purer and happier. 



THE INCOMPARABLE KEPUBLIC. 

AN ADDRESS BY COL. J. II. GILPATRICK. 

DELIVERED AT LEAVENWORTH, KAN. JULY 4tk, 1876. 

Fellow-Citizens : — Believing that in your patriotic, as in your 
religious devotions, you are best pleased with a brief discourse, I 
will occupy but a few of the precious moments set apart for these 
exercises of the day. 

I shall not startle you with the intelligence that this is the Cen- 
tennial Fourth of July celebration of American Independence ; it 
is known and read of all men — men of business and boys at play, 
ancient dames, aatumnal matrons and maidens gay, all swell the 
theme. "We feel it in the breeze and circumambient air. You 
might take the wings of the morning and fly to the uttermost parts 
of the earth, and there would greet you the glad tidings that the 
great and incomparable Republic of the United States of America 
had reached its centennial year. 

You have gathered here in large numbers, a multitude, to offer 
your patriotic devotions to the spirit of liberty and good govern- 
ment, and must be inspired by the thought that also on this natal 
morning oilier thousands, animated by a kindred spirit, from tin' 
Atlantic and Mount Monadnock in the East to the Sierras and the 
sounding shores of the Pacific in the West, beneath the pal- 
mettoes of the South and pines ami purple rocks of the North, 
reanimate with you their patriotic recollections of the day. 

Let us turn for a moment to the time and the circumstances in 
which the Declaration of Independence, just read before you was 
made, and it is impossible to do more than touch upon salient points 
of history in the few moments allotted me. 

Upon our shores at that time, was an army of thirty thousand 
men. armed and equipped with all that the art of war and unlimit- 
ed means could supply. Drilled, disciplined, and proud to obey 



860 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

the slightest wish of its imperial master. A force of veterans, with 
glittering crests and gleaming helmets, ready to destroy, as seem- 
ed inevitable, the hungry, half-armed, but devoted band, under 
the brave Washington. 

Scarcely one-fourth the number of the foe, and yet the congress of 
the colonies inspired by the sublime purpose of the people, passed 
the resolution of independence, which was two days after, followed 
by the declaration of principles, known as the Declaration of Inde- 
pendence. The die was cast. The word was spoken, and found 
cclio in the hearts of all lovers of liberty throughout the world. 
Of the struggle that ensued no mention need be made. 

The Navy, that gallant few, in ill-armed craft, guided by the 
bold and daring spirits as ever sailed the seas, that litle band of 
heroes — 

" Who stood to their country's glory fast, 
And nailed her colors to the mast." 

Nor of the army, its hardships and privations at Valley Forge, 
and throughout the seven years of war, and its victorious achieve- 
ments — nor of the patient virtue and pure patriotism of the people 
who submitted to want and misery to maintain their soldiers in the 
field. These have passed into story and into song. 

While celebrating the birth of our nation, it is proper and be- 
coming to make mention of its youth and manhood ; but to describe 
its development, which has reached a point far beyond the fondest 
hopes of the past, were impossible. Let this day and its patriotic 
impulse, supply the omission. 

At manhood, when in full vigor and prosperity, came the great 
rebellion, ending in the emancipation of the slave. This is not 
the time, if it shall ever come again, to dwell upon the mournful 
recollections of that terrible time. 

But from the dreadful ordeal — that baptism of blood — we came 
forth a nation renewed, and have from the titanic conflict, if such 
were necessary, the evidence of our prowess as a people. There 
sits here upon the platform before you, one who commanded vast 
armies in those melancholy days — when the storms of war and the 
clouds of battle most darkly assailed us — one conspicuous for tac- 
tical skill, strategic power — fortitude and true manliness — who 



ADDRESS — COL. J. II. GILPATIUCK. 861 

knows the joys of the whirlwind of victory, and the bravery of the 
foe sometimes victorious, and he, with all men of generous minds, 
will concede that, in that conflict — the rebels in arms, misguided 
as they were — still taught lessons of valor to the world. And 
now reunited as a people — the North victorious generously extends 
to the South her fostering hand. 

A word, as the phrase is, and I'll have done. It is common to 
greet celebrations of the 4th of July with laughter and derision, 
to make light of the day and its ceremonials, but the sentiment is 
wrong, and should be unknown among the people. If, as said the 
lamented Lincoln, in that most eloquent address delivered at Get- 
tysburg — this is a government of the people, by the people and 
for the people — if this be true — and it lies at the foundation of all 
our political beliefs and professions — then it is the duty of each 
citizen to revive, as returns the anniversary of our independence, 
its memories and reminiscences ; and the day should never, in 
word or thought, be treated with irreverence or contempt. 

We have received a glorious heritage, and should be true to the 
lofty aims of those who have gone before us. If men in positions 
of public trust prove recreant to principle ; if error and wrong ap- 
pear, let it be the first duty of every man, acknowledging his per- 
sonal responsibility as a part of the government, to effect reform 
and the removal of the evil. Our danger lies, not in the dishon- 
esty, but in the apathy and indifference of the people. 

To note the landmarks in our history ; to ever aim at the purity 
of the birth of the nation, is the safeguard of our destiny. To 
disreo-ai'd the memories of the past, and those who, by their cour- 
age and combination, achieved for us liberty and good government, 
were to play the thoughtless part of children, who gather shells 
upon the shore, and throw them one by one away. 

Let us then, amid the pleasures and pastimes of this day, renew 
our vows of loyalty to the nation, and to each other, as a people, 
and pledge ourselves by the memory of those who saved the for- 
tunes of the State at first, to stand as true citizens by its honor to 
the last. 



THE GLORY, GKOWTH AND GREATNESS OF 
AMERICA. 

A SPEECH BY L. M. GODDARD, ESQ. 

DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION AT LEAVENWORTH, 

kan., .tuly 4rn, 1876. 

Ladies and Gentlemen. — Retrospecting the past one hundred 
years, reviewing the vicissitudes, trials and triumphs of the nation, it 
is with infinite pride we realize that we are citizens of this, the 
proudest government on earth. Standing here to-day, in this the 
one hundredth anniversary of our country's independence, we can 
contemplate, with just pride, its glory, growth and greatness. Long 
the sun looks down upon our far extended territory, before he sinks 
to rest in the ocean which bounds our western domain, casting his 
last rays upon glittering sands, that golden tints celestial may fall 
upon terrestrial gold. Everywhere course our arterial rivers, bear- 
ing commercial life and activity throughout our land. 

Where but a few brief years ago was a wilderness untrod, now 
" labor with her hundred hands knocks at the golden gates of morn- 
ing," and the busy marts of trade echo with the ceaseless pasans of 
American progress and prosperity. Idly our flag floats beneath the 
skies of the tropics and triumphantly waves in the icy blast of the 
Polar seas, symbolizing our might and majesty to every land and 
nation ; whilst under the regime of peace, liberty sits smiling on 
our public hills, joy in our private valleys, justice in our courts, and 
and mercy on our highways. (After reviewing our privileges, duties 
and prospects, he closed by saying: ) 

In reciprocation for these priceless privileges it is our first duty 
as a nation to free ourselves from vice and inculcate the holy 
principle of virtue. We should wipe from our national escutcheon 
every blot of injustice — strike from our statutes every unchristian 
act. We should reform all the shameful customs that the pagan 
might of the past has fastened upon us ; that licentiousness, intern. 

perance and pauperism may no longer infect and unbraid our civil- 
862 



SPEECH L. M. GODDARD, ESQ. 86$ 

ization ; that we may stand with a front of unimpaired holiness 
and present to the world an example of political perfection. The 
theory of our government is as near perfection as human wisdom 
can devise. It is the exemplification of the progress attained through 
the civilization of all the centuries, and it rests with us to harmo- 
nize our customs and conduct with our professions and principles. 
We attempted, for many years, to harmonize two antagonistic 
principles, and under the broad regis of Republican liberty, per- 
petuated and fostered a relic of despotism, and while flaunting 
before the world our declaration of principles that " all men were 
created equal," nourished and legalized the worst phase of human 
tyranny, until it culminated in the mostgigantic civil strife the world 
ever saw ; until it required the sword of justice, wielded, by the 
gauntleted hand of war to sever thegordian knot that years of peace- 
ful effort would have been unvailing to undo, and with much treas- 
ure and many tears, the nation paid the price of its inconsis- 
tency and sin. Let us profit by the lessons of the past, and garner 
the golden sheaves of experience, and enshrining above all else our 
national integrity, press onward with renewed vigor toward the 
goal of national perfection, devoting our vast energies to the ad- 
vancement of liberty, and learning ; we shall draw after us the 
benisons of an enfranchised race, and shape aright the coming cen- 
turies, and send forth an influence that will eventually liberalize 
the world, for such I believe to be the mission of this government, 
not only to be as among ourselves a free, intelligent and happy 
people, but to send forth an influence that will prove fatal to im- 
perialism, and by force of example, introduce republicanism as the 
ultimate and universal form of government. And millions yet 
unborn will hail with gladness the anniversary of the day, on which 
the American Republic was born. For it is not ours alone to 
hymn the seraphic notes of liberty. Each day ; each month ; each 
year, will add glad voices to the chorus, and age succeeding age 
will swell the grand refrain until earth becomes resonant with the 
hallelujah of freedom. 



THE TEMPLE OF NATIONAL LIBERTY. 

AN ORATION : BY HON. JOHN I. JACOBS, GOV. OF WEST 
VIRGINIA. 

DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION AT WHEELING, WEST 
VIRGINIA, JULY 4TH, 1876. 

After reading the first paragraph of the Declaration of Indepen- 
dence the governor said : On this foundation has been erected a 
temple of National liberty, whose lofty spire is seen from afar by 
all the Nations of the earth, and whose altar-fires have given life, 
and light, and freedom to many peoples. A hundred years have 
passed away — a hundred years of trial, of struggle and of victory ; 
a hundred years signalized by the noblest and grandests achieve- 
ments of the human race : a century embracing within its folds 
greater discoveries in physical science, larger inventions for multi- 
plying many times the result of man's labor, and diminishing its 
weariness and exhaustion, a kindlier sympathy of man for man, a 
more general intelligence, and a more tolerant spirit in religious 
matters, than characterized all preceding centuries ; a century at 
the close of which, despite its many evils, despite its crime, vice 
and corruption, despite the anxieties of foreign wars, and the bur- 
dens and horrors of civil strife, we can say without hyperbole, 
that we are wiser, better, stronger. As a nation in the beginning 
of the century, we were too proud to submit to insult, but too weak 
to resent it ; at the end of the century, we are too massive in our 
strength to invite insult, and too just and magnanimous to provoke 
it. We commence the new century of our national existence at 
peace with the whole world, great in extent of territory ; great 
in resources, great in arms, and great in the possession of a free 
government. 

The soldiers, heroes, statesmen of revolutionary times are gone, 
but they still live in the grateful remembrance of a free people, 
864 



ORATION — HON. .JOHN I. JACOBS. 8G"> 

live to teach us by example and to awaken in us a new love of 
country. 

To commemorate the grandest event in our history, to do honor 
to the memory of those who signed the Declaration of Independence, 
and to the gallant spirits who, on land and sea, in the heats of sum- 
mer and storms of winter, amid penury and privation, enforced it 
by the valor of their arms, with uplifted hands to swear once 
more before the altar of our country renewed allegiance, to her 
and the cause of freedom, we, citizens, meet together on this the 
Centennial Anniversary of our nation's birth. 

Throughout all the land to-day the people come together to re- 
joice and to be glad ; the rich, the poor, sweet youth and hoary 
age, the dwellers by the sea and the toilers from the mountain side; 
from hill and valley, plain and prairie ; from field and farm, vine- 
yard and forest ; from city, town and village ; from shop and mine, 
store and wareroom ; from office and pulpit, they come. From 
the shores of the Atlantic the shouts of the people rise and swell 
with morning air and are borne in the path of the rising sun, 
across the continent, over mountain and river, and plain, until lost 
in the roar of the Pacific. The world beholds the sublime spec- 
tacle of forty millions of people once again united never to be di- 
vided, actuated by a common devotion to their country, with swell- 
ino- hearts uplifting their voices to welcome this day. All hail our 
country's natal day ! we welcome thee ! we greet thee ! Great God ! 
Sovereign Ruler of the universe ! we thank Thee for our beautiful 
land, for her bright lakes, her magnificent rivers, her towering moun- 
tains, her fertile valleys and her spreading prairies, for the rich 
products of her soil, her fruits, her flowers and her garnered wealth, 
for the pleasant homes for her millions of children, for her arts 
and artisans, her telegraphs and railroads, her temples of worship, 
her colleges, her schools and school houses, her hospitals and 
asylums for the feeble and destitute, her government, her laws 
and her freedom. As the years unfold and centuries come and go, 
we pray that Thou wilt protect and defend her. 



1776 CONTRASTED WITH 1876. 

AN ORATION BY HON. C. S. CHASE, MAYOR OF OMAHA. 

DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION AT OMAHA, NEB., 
JULY 4th, 1876. 

Fellow-Citizens, Ladies and Gentlemen : — It was on this 
day one hundred years ago that our forefathers, at old Liberty 
Hall, in Philadelphia, pledged their lives, their fortunes and their 
sacred honor, that we might to-day be free and independent. To 
every American, to every citizen, who lives under the old flag — 
the star-spangled banner — whether born on this or foreign soil, the 
day we celebrate, possesses features of peculiar and favorable con- 
sideration. 

It is most natural that our thoughts on this occasion should re- 
vert to the days and the people of the Revolution and fasten upon 
the events peculiar to that period. Then, the colonists so called — 
the name " United States " was not taken until after Independence 
was declared — numbered about 3,000,000 of people. Now we 
have fully 40,000,000. Then the inhabitants were poor and often 
suffered for want of the necessaries of life — now they are far from 
want, for the comforts, yea, luxuries of life are within the reach of 
all. Then thirteen colonies composed the little circle which made up 
the union — now thirty-eight states — for we now gladly count Colora- 
do — several of them nearly as populous as the entire country then 
was, are included in the list. Then a sparse settlement along the 
Atlantic coast included all the white people — now not a valley 
from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Niagara to the Rio Grande 
is exempt from the tread of the legitimate white settler. Then a 
few towns, the largest New York, but little larger than our own 
city is now, contained all our commerce, now we have cities with 
over a million of people, and our commerce whitens every ocean 
with its sails. Then the total business capital of our country was 

86G 



ORATION — HON. C. S. CHASE. 807 

less than that of individual merchants to-day. Then and for fifty 
years after, not a steam whistle was heard in the land, while to- 
day tens of thousands of these clarion-tongued harbingers of peace 
and plenty send forth their bugle notes in token of the power which 
drives the world. Then the dreaded lightning flashed along the 
clouded heavens untamed as the whirlwind ; now that same Hash, 
familiar as a friend, greets word with word and thought with 
thought, in the twinkling of an eye around the world. Then to 
transfer a likeness of the human face to canvas required weeks if 
not months, now it is done as quick as thought. In all the indus- 
trial departments, too, the same progress has been made. The old 
scythe with its crooked snath, two nibs, and one man power has 
given way to the chariot mower, with its hundred scythes, and four 
horse power. The hoe is superseded by the seed drill ami culti- 
vator ; the old plodding plow by the. steam furrow ; the needle 
by the sewing machine ; the hand weaver by the power loom ; the 
old spinning wheel by the steam jenny ; the human finger by the 
cotton gin ; the Franklin press, with its 200 impressions on one 
side per hour, by the Bullock steam press with its 20,000 sheets 
printed on both sides, per hour ; the mail boy by the steam engine ; 
the fire place, brick oven, pot hook, trammel, crane and three leg- 
ged kettle by the cooking range ; the old stage coach by the Pull- 
man palace car ; the dirt road by the steel track ; the bucket by 
the steam fire engine, and so on to the end, or rather, no end 
of the chapter. 

One hundred years ago the United Colonies of America only 
extended their domain from the Atlantic to the Mississippi river. 
All west of that line, including this vast Missouri valley, belonged 
to Spain, and so did Florida. In 1800, Spain ceded the Missouri 
valley to France, and in 1803, France sold the same to the United 
States for $15,000,000— the so-called " Louisiana purchase. " 
Only about seventy years ago, then — it may be within the memory 
of men now before me — was this magnificent valley in which we 
to-day celebrate, first explored by white men. At that period 
Lewis and Clark, who were sent out for that purpose by President 
Jefferson in 1804, travelled up the Missouri to its source and also 
to the head-waters of the Columbia. In fact, one hundred years 
ago the Alleghany mountains were, practically, the western boundary 



8G8 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

of the new Union, and but for the adventurous war spirit of George 
"Rogers Clark, a Kentuckian of the truest type, among the Indians 
west of these mountains, such might have remained the boundary 
for many years thereafter, and the settlement of the great west 
have been thereby greatly retarded. 

And what of the events of to-day. Towards the chief one all 
eyes are turned. To-day at Philadelphia is gathered an immense 
multitude — a national representation of the people of the United 
States — there witnessing, at the great centre of all the celebrations 
of the centennial anniversary of American Independence, the 
grandest display of patriotism, and listening to the most eloquent 
utterances of patriotic sentiment the world ever saw or heard. 
From that great heart-centre, run in every direction over this 
land, to-day, those telegraphic arteries of human thought, through 
which flows the nation's life blood — each one of which is throbbing 
with noblest impulses of human liberty and self government. 

Nor must we overlook the significant fact that at the same time 
the centennial exposition is there open, and that there, in peace 
and unity, are gathered the representatives of nearly all the nations 
of the globe vying with the Great Republic in the exhibition of 
their industrial products and their attainments in the arts and 
sciences. 

Not a city, town, hamlet, or village in all the broad land but is 
showing in some way, and to some extent, more or less conspicu- 
ous, signs that a great national event is transpiring, and the ten 
thousand cheers, which every moment are ascending, witness that 
the event is joyous and inspiring. 

Here, in our own goodly city, are gathered true patriots, patriots 
who, without regard to their place of birth or early teachings, with- 
out regard to their former predilections, now join as one man in 
commemoration of that event which had its origin in that liberty- 
loving patriotic element which is found in the mind of every man, 
no matter where born or how taught, that element which spoke its 
natural language when it uttered the declaration of American in- 
dependence one hundred years ago. The grandeur of that event 
and its results cannot be overestimated. The earnest prayer of 
the three millions of people who composed the sparsely settled 
population of this country at that time, has been more, much more 



ORATION — HON. C. S. CHASE. 8G9 

than fully answered, and by the all-powerful aid of Ilim who rules 
the universe and governs the nations — the God of battles — this 
people have passed through all the trials incident to national child- 
hood and youth, and now triumphantly fling their banner to the 
breeze of free thought, free speech, free schools and free men, in 
the confidence of the full stature of complete and perfect manhood. 
The principle upon which our national constitution is founded— 
love of liberty — is one of the noblest impulses of man's nature, 
nor does the desire and capacity for united self-government belong 
alone to the human species. From the insect kingdom upward to 
the highest type of the human race, the higher the ascending scale, 
the more conspicuous this liberty loving, self-governing principle 
becomes. It has from remotest times shown itself, and, at several 
of the earlier periods of the history of the human race, it overcame 
all other forms of government and established itself upon apparent- 
ly firm footing. Such was the case with Greece and with Rome, 
centuries before the Christian era. Greece celebrated her third 
centennial anniversary of independence and Rome her fourth. The 
fall of those ancient republics affords us a lesson worthy of study. 
The former fell, not from lack of unity — her sons stood side by 
side at Marathon and Thermopylae — but from over-indulgence in 
those luxuries which wealth and power naturally beget, coupled 
with the love of adventurous war, while the latter could not survive 
the jealousies of rival political factions and consequent internecine 
strife. The Goths, and Vandals, and Huns did not destroy her; 
she destroyed herself. In art, in science, in literature, and in archi- 
tecture, the splendor of these ancient republics far surpassed those 
of modern times, and their sad fall admonishes us of these United 
States that our stability as a republic does not depend so much upon 
our so-called patriotism, nor upon our material wealth or intellec- 
tual greatness as upon the strict integrity, the unflinching honesty 
of our office-holders, our public men. To-day we are powerful, 
and boast of national prowess and invincibility. To-morrow our 
country may shake from its centre to its circumference, through 
the dishonesty or treachery of its chosen rulers. Over the ancient 
republics we have, however, apparently one greal advantage, and 
that is the general dissemination of knowledge among the masses 
by means of our free schools. But even this may not save our 



870 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

nation, and, most assuredly, it will not without uprightness of ad- 
ministration. In our strength may lie our weakness. How oft 
the proud have fallen, and how great the fall ! To-day, 

" Where is Rome 1 
She lives but in the tale of other times ; 
Her proud pavilions are the heqnit's home, 
And her long colonnades, her public walks, 
Now faintly echo to the pilgrim's feet, 
Who comes to muse in solitude and trace 
Through the rank moss reveal'd, her honored dust." 

Italy — liberty-loving, liberty-deserving Italy — still fails to achieve 
independence. The struggles of Genoa and Venice availed not. 
There are to-day but three surviving republics in the old world 
which attract attention — Switzerland, Liberia and France. Swit- 
zerland — I had almost said, ancient Switzerland, so long has that 
little people, safe in their mountain fastnesses, strong in their 
weakness, maintained its integrity of free government, worthy 
descendants of William Tell, long may the continued respect of all 
nations leave you the full and free enjoyment of your rock-bound 
home. Liberia promises stability, and is an honor to her rulers. 
And what shall we say of France — France, the foster mother of 
polite literature, art and science ? To-day she again stands up a 
republic, and an apparent majority of her people are in favor of 
self-government. Her stronghold, like, ours, is in her system of 
public education, a system sustained by the government through its 
appointed cabinet officer, the minister of education. We will join 
iu earnest hopes that France may in due time celebrate her cen- 
tennial, as we now do. She is our natural ally and friend. She 
sent us a Lafayette, the compeer of our own Washington, and to- 
day several of her most promising republicans, including such men 
as Laboulaye, Oscar de LaFayette, Marquis de Rochambeau, 
Henri Martin, de Tocqueville and Waddington, are designing and 
constructing as a token of friendship, to be placed upon our soil, 
an immense, colossal statue representing Liberty enlightening the 
world, and at a cost of one hundred and twenty thousand dollars. Its 
erection upon Bedloe's Island, in the harbor of New York, the 
place selected, will be a worthy manifestation of the good-will of 
France towards America — a good-will fully reciprocated. Not 



ORATION HON. C. S. CHASE. 871 

forgetting that other foreign nations aided us in achieving our 
independence — that Germany sent us a Steuben to teach our men 
the art of arms, and a DeKalb, who fell pierced by eleven wounds 
at the battle of Camden; that Poland gave us Kosciusko and 
Pulaski — and other nations sent us also brave men, we must leave 
the old world. All the struggles for liberty there, whenever and 
wherever made, whether in Germany, the land of the hrave ; in 
Ireland, the home of the daring ; in Poland, Italy, Greece, Hun- 
gary or elsewhere, are worthy of success, but they are made against 
well-defined opposition and fearful odds. 

To-day the United States of America stands, the most powerful, 
the most respected, and the most patriotic nation on the face 
of the globe, able at one and the same time to conquer its 
enemies from abroad and to keep peace among its people at home. 
The old emblem of freedom, yonder stars and stripes, speaks to 
every nation a language all its own. It tells of liberty, equality, 
and fraternity — it represents bright events in the past and glows 
with radiant hopes of a triumphant future. Events, the mention 
of which stirs up a well spring of patriotism in every American 
heart, hopes, that a nation of citizens, like those I see before me, 
will not disappoint. 

Great as our nation has become, as a government it has not in 
that regard excelled its advancement in those departments, which 
mark and encourage individual greatness. Agriculture, trade, com- 
merce, manufacture, the arts, science, and education of the masses, 
have all kept pace with the liberty-loving, liberty-sustaining 
spirit of our people ; while among our great historical events the 
emancipation proclamation of President Lincoln stands boldly out 
as one of the proudest and noblest. Each one, and all these re- 
sults, are the natural, the almost spontaneous outgrowth of those 
sentiments which so fortunately led our ancestors to declare them- 
selves and their posterity tree and independent. 

To you my countrymen and countrywomen ; to you, who to-day 
are assembled a worthy representation of the patriotic citizens of 
this union ; to you and to those in this broad land who like you. 
and with you, rejoice that they live under a free government, \va. 
bequeathed an invaluable legacy by the immortal sous of seventy- 
six. Thus far, guided by the Greaf Author of human liberty, w« 



872 OUK NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

have travelled safely on our way in the fate of freedom. The toils 
we have endured, the obstacles we have overcome, and the lives 
which have been sacrificed, both to achieve and to preserve the 
old union, serve but to render it all the nearer and dearer to us. 

By every act, then, let us encourage and promote the true prin- 
ciples of the government. Let the love of Liberty hereafter, as 
heretofore, be dearer than love of life. Let it be our highest aim 
to promote and uphold everywhere, in those whom we choose to 
man the old Ship of State, from the cabin boy up to the captain, 
a spirit of strict honesty — to purify the ballot box, and perfect the 
ballot, and 1976 shall be emblazoned on the radiant banners of a 
still free and independent people. Then the citizens of Omaha 
who stand where we stand to-day, to celebrate the second centen- 
nial will represent a city counting its inhabitants by the hundred 
thousand — a virtuous and exalted community living under and 
enjoying all the institutions of a model republic. 

Then too, other nations in the old world, with confidence in our 
example will have developed into powerful republics ; and in this 
new world, other republics shall have been established, and, if it 
shall have become necessary for the safety of our government, other 
territory shall have been annexed, and it may be, a hundred States 
shall consult together in the halls of our National Congress, and 
be represented on the old war-scarred banner by a hundred stars 
spangled on its field of blue ; basking then, as we do to-day, in the 
bright sunlight of civil and religious liberty. 



CENTENNIAL ADDEESS. 
BY GOV. JOHN L. ROUTT. 

DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION AT DENVER, 
COL., JULY 4th, 1876. 

Fellow Citizens.— One century ago the founders of our 
Republic enunciated the immortal principles of the Declara- 
tion of Independence, and as each anniversary of that day 
has been sacredly observed with appropriate ceremonies, so 
we, in common with millions of our fellow citizens through- 
out the length and breadth of the land, have assembled to 
commemorate the Centennial of this Republic. It is almost 
beyond the power of language fittingly to describe the differ- 
ence between America one hundred years ago and this present 
grand commonwealth of States, of which our own Colorado is 
the thirty-eighth. Then, a few feeble colonies, without 
money, army, or munitions of war, without, too, the support 
of any other people, aroused to desperation by the oppression 
and tyranny of the mother country, resolved to throw off the 
yoke of bondage and to assume among the powers of the earth 
the separate and equal station to which, as they declared, the 
laws of nature and nature's God entitled them. Every 
schoolboy knows the history of that struggle with the proudest 
and most powerful nation on the globe, which, after a seven 
years' conflict, was forced to acknowledge the States of 
America as free and independent. It is not for me to trace 
the events of these intervening years; that must be left to 
our historian, but I desire to congratulate you, my fellow 
citizens, upon what has been accomplished, and especialy 
that we, the people of Colorado, can add one more star to the 
galaxy which now flashes forth from the azure field of the 
grand old flag. We may well be proud; proud of our coun- 
try, proud of our State, proud of our citizens; their intelli- 
gence, energy, integrity and genius; but with our pride there 
should come swelling up from grateful hearts, adoration, 
thanksgiving and praise to the God of nations, who has made 
us what we are. That I may not occupy too much time 
allotted to this day's exercises, permit me, in behalf of the 
good people of Denver, to welcome one and all, stranger and 
citizen, and to cordially invite your participation in the obser- 
vances of our memorial day, hoping that it will prove not only 
pleasant but also profitable, and a day long to be remembered. 



FKEEDOM'S GKAND EEYIEW. 

A.N ORATION BY HON. C. E. DELONG. 

DELIVERED AT THE CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION AT GOLD HILL, 
NEV., JULY 4, 1876. 

Mr. President and Countrymen : I beg you to realize the 
grandeur of this moment of time. Centuries clasp hands in 
our immediate presence. Time seals at this holy moment, as an 
accomplished fact, the grand experiment of our fa'thers. We, who 
have carried in security the ark of the covenant of our father's 
faith above the reach of the mad waves of foreign intrigue and 
domestic commotion down to the eternal shores of the irrevocable 
past, now press with our pioneer footsteps the golden coasts of 
a new century of time. C4od, in His loving kindness, has reserved 
for us this sublime and delightful honor. Time now stretches 
forth his hand to reverse the glass and shift the sands of centu- 
ries, and at this moment our gaze rests upon the beauteous dream- 
land of the future, radiant with the rainbow hues of peaceful prom- 
ise ; and behind us stretches far away the grand highway of our 
national progress. It winds amidst sweet valleys and by silvery 
streams, each step of its course honored by the deeds of heroes and 
sanctified by the graves of martyrs. At its commencement point 
still gleams the beacon of our faith, flashing from the turret 
of the Temple of Truth. In the soft light of their glow we behold 
the lilies of enduring love nodding in sweet holiness by the last 
resting place of the just, and hiding with their merciful shadows 
the graves of the erring. Fame sounds her wildest trump of joy 
to-day, Hope spreads her proudest banners on the sky, and Faith 
inscribes anew thereon the maxims of Liberty : 

" Man is capable of all self-government — 

" All men by nature are born free and equal." 

My countrymen, that we may fully appreciate the triumphs 
of the present, let us indulge in a brief review of the past, 

874 



OKATION — HON. C. E. DELONG. 875 

One hundred years ago this day, in old Independence Hall 
at Philadelphia, the Convention was ahout concluding its labors. 
That Convention had met to discuss the rights of man, and frame 
the argument and appeal of the oppressed. It had met in defiance 
of gathering armies and circling fleets, bearing the vengeance of the 
most powerful despot on earth. It deliberated amidst the storms 
of menace hurled by the haughtiest Power on earth ; it sat in the 
fearful shadow of the forest of gibbets ; the Convention now 
awaits the report of its Special Committee of Three; the tall form 
of John Hancock fills the chair ; over his head is spread a banner 
upon whose union glisten the rays of thirteen feeble stars. That 
banner is scarcely one year old. It was born a brief twelve 
months ago amidst the smoke, carnage and death of Bunker Hill. 
It as yet is unknown to the world. My countrymen, that banner 
was the infant flag of the free. 

Presently the Committee enters and all is attention. At their 
head walks the Chairman, bearing in his hand the parchment upon 
which is written their report — the ink is not yet dry. That man 
is Thomas Jefferson, the sage of Monticello. That report is 
the grand old Declaration of Independence — to the splendid 
rendition of which you have listened this day — embodying the 
logic of Liberty, which our gallant ancestors with their flaming 
swords wrote in letters of fire upon the tablets of enduring time. 

With Jefferson advances his associate members, John Adams 
and Benjamin Franklin. What other cause had arrayed as its cham- 
pion such a trio of intellectual giants ? All is silence and awe in 
that chamber as the reading of the report commences. Its 
extreme boldness excites the fears of some, but as its silvery logic 
and golden truth distils drop by drop into the heart of each 
listener, conviction follows. Then comes the rush to sign, and 
fifty-six men, the fathers of our faith, pledge to each other and to 
Freedom their lives and sacred honors. 

Thus was Liberty born. 

Men trembled ; but angels, divining the purposes of God, 
caught up the holy messengers of sound and bore them through 
the spheres. That music, circling this earth, coursing through the 
arches of heaven, returns to us to-day in the grand chorus of re- 
joicing millions now swelling upon the air. Behold the scene at 



876 OUK NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Philadelphia to-day. la that same old hall the Chief Magistrate 
of a free people holds a Republican Court. Sovereigns, princes, 
the representatives of all nations of the earth there do homage to 
our nation. Millions of flags flash in triumph ; thousands of can- 
nons roar their joy, and America's millions chant the jubilee of 
praise. The gibbet's shadow and the menace have sunk into ob- 
livion with the Tyrant. The old State House now outranks the 
Palace of the Georges. Close beside this hall rises a lofty palace ; 
its dome is lifted up as if to meet the smiles of heaven half way 
from the skies. This is the Cradle of Liberty grown into the 
grand proportions of a Temple of the Free. Liberty here holds 
court. Art, Genius, Peace, Beauty and Power are her aids. No 
note of alarm fills the air ; no pulse beats with fear or heart sinks 
in doubt. Here gather the representatives of every people in the 
world, bearing their priceless burthens to spread at Liberty's feet. 
Behold them vie with her own children to weave the choicest gar- 
land for her triumph. Such are the glories of this hour. Con- 
trast the two pictures, and from the most profound depths of your 
natures and your hearts return praise for these blessings to that 
Almighty God who in His own good time thus always vindicates 
the right and overcomes the wrong. 

Mr. President, man has ever cherished the fond belief that the 
sacrament of death dissolves none of the attributes of the soul ; 
that the love which thrills his being here, for principles and per- 
sons, also imbues his spiritual existence. Believing this, the sweet 
hope follows that the ordinances of a merciful God permit the de- 
parted one, whose angel feet tread the emerald fields of Paradise, 
to watch over his earthly loves and joy with them in their joys. 

If this dream be true, hi this proud hour, when Freedom holds 
her grand review, upon the alabaster battlements of heaven stand 
the host of sages and martyrs, who, upon earth, braved and suffer- 
ed to elevate mankind. Behold the immortal Washington, sage 
of Mt. Vernon, leading by the hand the martyred Lincoln — Father 
and Saviour of a common country. The Sage of Monticello, with 
his folded arms, and towering brow, his pen of fire ; he, who dying, 
craved no other boon than that above his grave should be inscribed 
" Here lies the author of the Declaration of Independence." There is 
Henry of Virginia ; he who startled a world with his loud cry, " Give 



ORATION — HON. C. E. DEl.OXG. 877 

me liberty or give ine death. That cry jet rings down the aisles 
of a century as pure and clear as when uttered in the House of Bur- 
gesses of Virginia. There is Franklin, King of the Lightning, 
philosopher and statesman. He, who in plain Quaker garb, stood 
in the presence of the proudest sovereign and the haughtiest aris- 
tocracy of the world, charming and convincing all with his eloquent 
appeal in behalf of Freedom. There is the boyish form of La- 
fayette, as he bounded from the ease of a court and the dalliances 
of a bride to the gloom and terrors of Valley Forge. Bold Rupert 
of Liberty! what joy for thee does this day hold, for not only 
America, but also France is free. There is Allen, bold Green 
mountain boy, as he looked when he leapt Ticonderoga's battle- 
ments and demanded its surrender in the name of the Great Jeho- 
vah and of the Continental Congress. And Stark, with the light 
of battle in his eyes, as when at Bennington he declared that that 
day victory should be his or Molly Stark should be a widow. And 
Morgan, with his iron-nerved riflemen — the nun of Quebec, Sara- 
toga and Cowpens. Pulaski, as he charged at Brandywine to 
rescue Washington, and as he looked, folded in the arms of death 
before the gates of Savannah. Montgomery, hero of Quebec — he 
who in the darkness of the night, amidst the driving snows and 
hurtling cannon shot, poured out the libations of his noble heart 
in the cause of Libert} r , cradled in the arms of Aaron Burr. See 
the gallant Cowboys of the Hudson — AVilliams, Paulding and Van 
Wart — whose rugged honesty ill-fated Andre's gold nor promise 
could not overcome. And there is Mad Anthony as he charged at 
Germantown and at Stony Point, and Putnam, Knox, Lee, Pick- 
ens, Sumpter, Marion, Green, Gates, and all the countless throng 
of sages and heroes of the Revolution, and with them stands the 
Murat of the battle-field, Arnold — aye, Benedict Arnold. Death 
lias sanctified his life — God reverses Man's judgment ; the shadows 
of a century have forever hidden his faults. We can only see him 
now as the first to spring to Freedom's side ; as he appeared when 
he led his troops through the forests of Maine and Canada ; as he 
appeared on that winter night when planning the assault with 
Montgomery, or, when lying shattered and wounded, he implored 
the faithful and gallant Morgan to leave him to his fate ; or as at 
Champlain, when he sank with his burning fleet beneath the wave 



878 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

rather than leave any trophy of victory for the enemy ; or as at 
Saratoga, when the day seemingly was lost, he, like a meteor, 
alone, without authority or any command, summoned the army to 
follow him and led their way to victory. Standing there, our 
fathers behold the fair daughters and brave sons of Liberty sport- 
ing in the bright vallevs that border the river where flow unvexed 
the sweet waters of Peace. ( Whilst Europe trembles and grows 
pale, with war's affright here Peace stands at the helm, and hope 
and glory fill our sails. This land, the asylum for the oppressed 
of all the earth, draws to it representative intellect, genius and 

Id 1 from every nation, and fusing all, gives to us as a nation the 

engrossed intelligence, endurance and physique of them all. As 
the fruits of civil, religious and political liberty, they behold our 
institutions of learning, and particularly the free schools, pouring 
yearly into the wondering lap of the world legions of men with 
cultured intellects, all disciples of the faith that man is capable of 
self-government, and that all men by nature are born free and 
equal. These legions form the nucleus that in time of peace chain 
the elements, outstrip time, bridge space and whirl the myriad 
wheels of industry ; and, in time of war, with every successive 
effort plant higher and still higher the emblem of the free. They 
behold the Christian Church, the Jewish Synagogue, the Moslem 
and Pagan Temple, and the Lyceum for Free Thought, all rise 
side by side. The myriads of their devotees mingling their cur- 
rents without a menace or a scowl of hate, proclaim conscience 
free. They behold the thirteen feeble stars grown into a vast con- 
stellation, each an empire in itself, yet revolving around a common 
center, bound and attracted thereto by the unseen bonds of consti- 
tutional law. That flag which they gave to Liberty in the carnage, 
smoke and death of rebellion, has grown into the recognized insig- 
nia of Freedom throughout the world. No nation is so distant or 
so powerful that it does not there hold its honored place ; no ocean 
that does not mirror it ; no desert or mountain land that has not 
been lighted by its smile. It waves in sovereignty over Alaskan 
glaciers and amid the leafy bannerets of the tropical everglades 
it greets the rising sun from amid the towering forests of the Ken- 
nebec and waves him good night from the pearly shores of the 
Pacific ; and now, unstained by dishonor, unsullied by defeat, it 
flashes back to heaven the triumphs of a century. 



THE SURRENDER OF LORD CORNWALLIS, 

A CENTENNIAL ORATION DELIVERED 
BY HON. ROBERT C. WINTHROP, 

at yorktown, va., oct. 1'.), 1 ss 1 . 

Mr. President, and 

Eellow-Citizens of the United States: — 

I am profoundly sensible of the honor of being called to 
take so distinguished a part in this great Commemoration, 
and most deeply grateful to those who have thought me 
worthy of such an honor. But it was no affectation, when, 
in accepting the invitation of the Joint Committee of Con- 
gress, I replied that I was sincerely conscious of my own 
insufficiency for so high a service. And if I felt, as I could 
not fail to feel, a painful sense of inadequacy at that moment 
when the service was still a great way off, how much more 
must I be oppressed and overwhelmed by it now, in the im- 
mediate presence of the occasion! As I look back to the men 
with whom I have been associated in my own Commonwealth, 
— Choate, Everett, Webster, to name no others, — I may well 
feel that I am here only by the accident of survival. 

But I cannot forget that I stand on the soil of Virginia", 
a State which, of all others in our Union, has never needed to 
borrow an orator for any occasion, however important or 
exacting. Her George Mason and Thomas Jefferson, her 
James Madison and John Marshall, were destined, it is true, 
to render themselves immortal by their pens, rather than by 
their tongues. The pens which drafted the Virginia Hill of 
Rights, the Declaration of American Independence, and so 
much of the text, the history, the vindication and the true 
construction of the American Constitution, need fear com- 
parison with none which have ever been the implements of 
human thought and language. But from her peerless Patrick 
Henry, through the long succession of statesmen and patriots 
who have illustrated her annals, down to the recent day of her 
Rives, her McDowell, and her Grigsby, — all of whom 1 havo 



880 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

been privileged to count among my personal friends, — Virginia 
has had orators enough for every emergency, at the Capitol 
or at home. She has them still. And yet I hazard nothing 
in saying that the foremost of them all would have agreed 
with me, at this hour, that the theme and the theatre are 
above the reach of the highest art; and would be heard ex- 
claiming with me, in the words of a great Roman poet, — 
" Unde ingenium par materia??" — Whence, whence, shall come 
a faculty equal to the subject? For myself, I turn humbly 
and reverently to the only Source from which such inspiration 
can be invoked ! 

Certainly, Fellow-Citizens, had I felt at liberty to regard 
the invitation as any mere personal compliment, — supremely 
as I should have prized it,- — I might have hesitated about 
accepting it much longer than I did hesitate. But when I 
reflected on it as at least including a compliment to the old 
Commonwealth of which I am a loyal son, — when I reflected 
that my performance of such a service might help, in ever so 
slight a degree, to bring back Virginia and Massachusetts, 
even for a day — Would that it might be forever! — into those 
old relations of mutual amity and good nature and affection 
which existed in the days of our Fathers, and without which 
there could have been no surrender here at Yorktown to be 
commemorated, — no Union, no Independence, no Constitu- 
tion, — I could not find it in my heart for an instant to decline 
the call. Never, never could I shrink from any service, how- 
ever arduous, or however perilous to my own reputation, 
which might haply add a single new link, or even strenghten 
and brighten an old link, in that chain of love, which it lias 
been the prayer of my life might land together in peace and c 
good will, in all time to come, not only New England and the 
Old Dominion, but the whole North and the whole South, for 
the best welfare of our commou Country, and for the best 
interests of Liberty throughout the world! 

Not the less, however, have I come here to-day in faint hope 
of being able to meet the expectations and demands of the 
occasion. For, indeed, there are occasions which no man can 
fully meet, either to the satisfaction of others or of himself; — • 



ORATION— ROBERT C. WINTIIROP. 881 

occasions which seem to scorn and defy all utterance of 
human lips; whose complicated emotionsand incidents cannot 
be compressed within the little compass of a discourse; whose 
far-reaching relations and world-wide influences refuse to be 
narrowed and condensed into any formal sentences or para- 
graphs or pages; — occasions when the booming cannon, the 
rolling drum, the swelling trumpet, the cheers of multitudes, 
and the solemn Te Deums of churches and cathedrals, afford 
•the only adequate expression of the feelings, which their mere 
contemplation, even at the end of a century, cannot fail to 
kindle. 

Yet, if it be not in me, — at an age which might fairly have 
exempted me altogether from such an effort, — to do full 
justice to the grand assembly and the grander topics before 
me, — it, certainly, is in me, my friends, to breathe out from 
a full heart the congratulations which belong to this hour; 
to recall briefly some of the mementous incidents we are here 
to commemorate; to sketch rapidly some of the great scenes 
which gave such imperishable glory to yonder Bay and River, 
and their historic banks; to name with honor a few at least 
of the illustrious men connected with those scenes; and above 
all, and before all, to give some feeble voice to the gratitude 
which must swell and fill and overflow every American breast 
to-day toward that generous and gallant Nation across the sea 
— represented here at this moment by so many distinguished 
sons, of so many endeared and illustrious names, — which 
helped us, so signally and so decisively, at the most critical 
point of our struggle, in vindicating our rights and liberties, 
and in achieving our national Independence. 

Yes, it is mine, — and somewhat peculiarly mine, perhaps, 
notwithstanding the presence of the official representatives of 
my native State, — to bear the greetings of Plymouth Rock to 
Jamestown; of Bunker Hill to Yorktown; of Boston, recov- 
ered from the British forces in '76, to Mount Vernon, the 
home in life and death of her illustrious Deliverer; and there 
is no office, within the gift of Congresses, Presidents, or People, 
which I could discharge more cordially and fervently. And 
may I not hope, — as one who is proud to feel coursing in his 



882 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

veins the Huguenot blood of a Massachusetts patriot, who en- 
joyed the most affectionate relations with the young Lafayette, 
when he first led the way to our assistance; — as one, too, who 
has personally felt the warm pressure of his own hand, and re- 
ceived a benediction from his own lips, under a father and a 
mother's roof, nearly threescore years ago, when he was the 
guest of the nation; — and, let me add, as an old presiding offi- 
cer in that representative chamber at the Capitol, where, side by 
side with that of Washington, — its only fit companion-piece, 
— the admirable full-length portrait of the Marquis, the work 
and the gift of his friend Ary Scheffer, was so long a daily 
and hourly feast for my eyes and inspiration for my efforts; — 
may I not hope, that I shall not be regarded as a wholly unfit 
or inappropriate organ of that profound sense of obligation 
and indebtedness to Lafayette, to Rochambeau, to De Grasse, 
and to France, which is felt and cherished by us all at this 
hour? 

For, indeed, Fellow-Citizens, our earliest and our latest 
acknowledgments are due this day to France, for the inestimable 
services which gave us the crowning victory of the 19th of 
October, 1781. It matters not for us to speculate now, 
whether American Independence might not have been ulti- 
mately achieved without her aid. It matters not for us to 
calculate or conjecture how soon, or when, or under what 
circumstances, that grand result might have been accom- 
plished. We all know that, God willing, such a consumma- 
tion was as certain in the end as to-morrow's sunrise, and that 
no earthly potentates or powers, single or conjoined, could 
have carried us back into a permanent condition of colonial 
dependence and subjugation. From the first blood shed at 
Lexington and Concord, from the first battle at Bunker Hill, 
Great Britain had lost her American Colonies, and their 
established and recognized independence was only a question 
of time. Even the surrender of Burgoyne at Saratoga in 
1777, — the only American battle included by Sir Edward 
Creasy in his "Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World," of 
which he says that "no military event can be said to have 
exercised a more important influence on the future fortunes 



ORATIOtf— ROBERT C. WINTHROP. 883 

of mankind," and of which the late Lord Stanhope had said 
that this surrender "had not merely changed the relation of 
England and the feelings of Europe towards these insurgent 
colonies, but had modified for all times to come, the connection 
between every Colony and every parent State,"— even this 
most memorable surrender gave only a new assurance of a 
foregone conclusion, only hastened the march of events to a 
predestined issue. That march for us was to be ever onward 
until the goal was reached. However slow or difficult it might 
prove to be, at one time or at another time, the motto and 
the spirit of Johp Hampden were in the minds, and hearts, 
and wills, of all our American patriots — "Nulla vestigia ret- 
rorsum" — No footsteps backward. 

Nor need we be too curious to inquire, to-day, into any 
special inducements which France may have had to intervene 
thus nobly in our behalf, or into any special influences under 
which her King, and Court, and People, resolved at last to 
undertake the intervention. Wo may not forget, indeed, 
that our own Franklin, the great Bostonian, had long been 
one of the American Commissioners in Paris, and that the 
fameof his genius, the skill and adroitness of his negotiations, 
and the magnetism of his personal character and presence, 
were no secondary or subordinate elements in the results 
which were accomplished. As was well said of him by a 
French historian, " His virtues and his renown negotiated for 
him; and, before the second year of his mission had expired, 
no one conceived it possible to refuse fleets and an army to 
the compatriots of Franklin." The Treaty of Commerce and 
the Treaty of Alliance were both eminently Franklin's work, 
and both were signed by him as early as the 6th of February, 
1778. His name and his services are thus never to be 
omitted or overlooked in connection with the greal debt which 
we owe to France, and which we so gratefully commemorate 
on this occasion. 

But signal as his services were, Franklin cannot be named 
as standing first in this connection. Nearly two years before 
his Treaties were negotiated and signed, a step had been taken 
by another than Franklin, which led, directly and indirectly, 



884 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

to all that followed. The young Lafayette, then but nine- 
teen years of age, a captain of the French dragoons, stationed 
at Met/,, at a, dinner given by the commandant of the garrison 
to the Duke of Gloucester, a brother of George in., happened 
to hear the tidings of our Declaration of Independence, which 
had reached the Duke that very morning from London. It 
formed the subject of animated and excited conversation, in 
which the enthusiastic young soldier took part. And before 
he had left the table, an inextinguishable spark had been 
struck and kindled in his breast, and his whole heart was on 
fire in the cause of American liberty. Regardless of the re- 
monstrances of his friends, of the Ministry, and of the King 
himself, in spite of every discouragement and obstacle, he 
soon tears himself away from a young and lovely Avife, leaps 
on board a vessel which he had provided for himself, braves 
the perils of a voyage across the Atlantic, then swarming with 
cruisers, reaches Philadelphia by way of Charleston, South 
Carolina, and so wins at once the regard and confidence of 
the Continental Congress, by his avowed desire to risk his life 
in our service, at his own expense, without pay or allowance 
of any sort, that on the 31st of July, 1777, before lie was yet 
quite twenty years of age, he was commissioned a Major- 
General of the Army of the United States. 

It is hardly too much to say, that from that dinner at Metz, 
and that 31st day of July in Philadelphia, may be dated the 
train of influences and events which culminated, four years 
afterwards, in the surrender of Cornwallis to the Allied Forces 
of America and France. Presented to our great Virginian 
commander-in-chief, a few days only after his commission 
was voted by Congress, an intimacy, a friendship, au affection, 
grew up between them almost at sight, which might well-nigh 
recall the classical loves of Achilles and Patroclus, or of iEneas 
and Achates. Invited to become a member of his military 
family, and treated with the tenderness of a son, Lafayette is 
henceforth to be not only the beloved and trusted associate of 
Washington, but a living tie between his native and his almost 
adopted country. Returning to France in January, 1779, 
after eighteen months of brave and valuable service here, — 



OKATIOK— ROBERT C. WINTHROP. 885 

during wliicli he had been wounded at Brandy wine, had 
exhibited signal gallantry and skill while an indignant wit- 
ness of Charles Lee's disgraceful, if not treacherous, miscon- 
duct at Monmouth, and had received the thanks of Congress 
for important services in Rhode Island, — he was now in the 
way of appealing personally to the French Ministry to send 
an army and a fleet and to our assistance. lie did appeal; and 
the zeal and force of his arguments at length prevailed. 
Beaumarchais had already done something for us in the way 
of money; and the amiable and well-meaning Count D'Es- 
taing, at one time a protege of Voltaire, had, indeed, already 
made efforts in our behalf with twelve ships of the line and 
three frigates. Poor Marie Antoinette must not be forgotten 
as having prompted and procured that assistance. D'Estaing, 
however, owing in part to the want of wise counsel and co- 
operation, had accomplished little or nothing for us, and had 
left our shores to die at last by the guillotine. But now, by 
the advice and persuasion of Lafayette, the army of Rocham- 
beau, and afterwards the powerful fleet of the Count do 
Grasse, are to be sent over to join us; and the young Marquis, 
to whom alone the decision of the King was first communi- 
cated as a state secret, hastens back with eager joy to announce 
the glad tidings to Washington, and to arrange with him for 
the reception and employment of the auxiliary forces. 

Accordingly, on the 10th of July, L780, a squadron of ten 
ships of war, under the unfortunate Admiral de Ternay, 
brings Rochambeau with six thousand French troops into the 
harbor of Newport, with instructions "to act under Washing- 
ton and live with the Americans as their brethren;" and the 
American officers are forthwith desired by Washington, in gen- 
eral orders, " to wear white and black cockades as a symbol 
of affection for their Allies." 

Nearly a full year, however, was to elapse before the rich 
fruits of that alliance were to be developed,— a year of the 
greatest discouragement and gloom for the American cause. 
The gallant but vainglorious Gates, whose head bad been turned 
by his success at Saratoga, bad now failed disastrously at, 
Camden; and Qprnwallis, elated by having vanquished the 



880 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

conqueror of Burgoyne, was instituting a campaign of terror in 
the Carolinas, with Tarleton and the young Lord Rawdon as 
the ministers of his rigorous severities, and was counting 
confidently on the speedy reduction of all the Southern 
Colonies. Our siege of Savannah had failed to recover it 
from the British. Charleston, too, had heen forced to capitu- 
late to Clinton. Not the steady conduct and courage of 
Lincoln; not the resolute endurance and heroism of Greene, 
the great commander of the Southern Department; not the 
skilful strategy of Lafayette himself in foiling Cornwallis at 
so many turns, and leading him into countless perplexities 
and pitfalls; not all the chivalry of Sumter and Marion and 
Pickens; not the noble and generous conduct of his own 
Virginia, exposing and almost sacrificing herself for the relief 
and rescue of her Southern sisters; not even our well-won 
victories at King's Mountain under Campbell and Sbelby, and 
at the Cowpens under the glorious Morgan,— could keep 
Washington from being disheartened and despondent in look- 
ing for any early termination of the cares and responsibilities 
which weighed upon him so heavily. 

The war on our side seemed languishing. The sinews of 
war were slowly and insufficiently supplied. All the untiring 
energy and practical wisdom and patriotic self-sacrifice of 
Robert Morris, the great Fianancier of the Revolution, with- 
out whom the campaign of 1781 could not have been carried 
along, hardly sufficed to keep our soldiers in food aud cloth- 
ing. Discontents were gathering and growing in the Army, 
and even its entire dissolution began to be seriously appre- 
hended. A provision that all enlistments should be made to 
the end of the war, and entitling all officers, who should con- 
tinue in service to that time, to half-pay for life, did much, 
for the moment, to reanimate the recruiting system aud give 
new spirits and confidence to the officers. But it was soon 
found that, l'n many of the States, enlistments could only be 
effected for short terms; while the half-pay for life was ren- 
dered odious to the people, and, before the war was over, had 
become the subject of a commutation, which to this hour has 
been but partially fulfilled, and which calls loudly, even amid 



ORATION — ROBERT C. WTNTHROP. 887 

these Centennial rejoicings, for equitable consideration and 
adjustment. The Confederation winch was to unite the 
strength, wealth, and wisdom of all the Colonies "in a per- 
petual Union," which had been signed by so many of them 
three years before, and which now, on the tst of March, L781, 
has just received the tardy signature of the last of them, is 
but miserably fulfilling its promise. Arsenals and magazines, 
field equipage and means of transportation, and, above all, 
both men and money, are lamentably wanting for any vigorous 
offensive campaign. "Scarce any one of the States," says 
Bancroft, "had as yet sent an eighth part of its quota into 
the field," and there was no power in the Confederate Congress 
to enforce its requisitions. In vain did the young Alexander 
Hamilton, at only twenty-three years of age, with a precocity 
which has no parallel but that of the younger Pitt, pour out 
lessons of political and financial wisdom from the camp, in 
which he is soon to display such conspicuous valor, arraigning 
the Confederation as "neither fit for war nor peace." In vain 
had Washington written to George Mason, not long before, — 
"Unless there be a material change both in our civil and 
military policy, it will be useless to contend much longer:" — 
following that letter with another, as late as the Oth of April, 
1TSL, to Colonel John Laurens, who had gone on a special 
mission to Paris, in which he gave this most explicit warning: 
"If France delays a timely and powerful aid in the critical 
posture of our affairs, it will avail us nothing should she at- 
tempt it hereafter. We are at this hour suspended in the 
balance. . . . We cannot transport the provisions from the 
States in which they are assessed to the army, because we 
cannot pay the teamsters, who will no longer work for certifi- 
cates. Our troops are approaching fast to nakedness, and we 
have nothing to clothe them with. Our hospitals are without 
medicine, and our sick without meat, except such as well men 
eat. All our public works are at a stand, and the artificers 
disbanding. In a word, we are at the end of our tether, and 
uoio or never our deliverance must nunc" 

Cod's holy name be praised, deliverance was to come, and 
did come, now! 



888 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Any material change in our civil policy was, indeed, to await 
the action of civil rulers; but Washington himself and alone, 
could happily control our military policy. And he did control 
it. Within forty days from the date of that emphatic letter 
to Laurens,— on the 18th of May, 1181, — Rochambeau, with 
the Marquis do Chastellux, leaves Newport for Wethersfield, 
in Connecticut, to hold a conference with Washington at his 
call. On the Oth of July, the union of the French troops 
with the American army is completely accomplished at Phil- 
lipsburg, ten miles only from the most advanced post of the 
British in New York, — the two armies united making an effect- 
ive force of at least ten thousand men. On the 8th, Washington 
has a review of honor of the French troops, Rochambeau hav- 
ing reviewed the American troops on the 7th. On the l'Jth of 
August, the united armies commence their march from Phil- 
lipsburg, and reach Philadelphia on the 3d of September, 
where, Congress being in session, the French army, as we are 
told in the journal of the gallant Count William de Deux- 
Ponts, "paid it the honors which the King had ordered us to 
pay." And in that journal, so curiously rescued from Paris 
a bookstall on one of the Quais, in 1867,* the Count most 
humorously adds: "The thirteen members of Congress took 
off their thirteen hats at each salute of the flags and of the 
officers; and that is all I have seen that was respectful or 
remarkable." Well, that was surely enough. What more 
could they have done? Virginia herself, even in her earlier, 
I will not presume to say her better, days of the strictest 
construction, could not have desired or conceived a more 
significant and signal homage to the doctrine of States' Rights, 
than those thirteen hats so ludicrously lifted together at the 
successive salutes of each French officer and each French flag! 

Thus far the destination of the Allied Armies was a secret 
even to themselves. Certainly, Sir Ileury Clinton, the British 
commander-in-chief at New York, was carefully kept in igno- 
rance of Washington's plans, and was even made to believe 
that on himself the double bolt was to fall. He was, indeed, 

* By Dr. Samuel A. Green, of Boston. 



ORATION — ROBERT C. WTNTHROP. 8S£' 

so sorely outwitted and perplexed that he is found, at one 
moment, sending urgent orders to Cornwallis for large detach- 
ments of his Southern army; at another moment, promising 
to send substantial reinforcements to him; and at last making 
up his mind, too late, to join Cornwallis in person, with as 
little delay as possible. Meantime, in the hope of creating a 
diversion, lie depatches the infamous Arnold — whose treason 
had shocked the moral sense of mankind less than a year he- 
fore, of whom Washington is at this moment writing "that 
the world is disappointed at not seeing him in gibbets," and 
who had just been recalled from an expedition in this very 
region, where he had burned and pillaged whatever he could 
lay his hands on, or set his torch to, along yonder James 
Kiver— to prosecute his nefarious exploits at the North, and 
strike a parricidal blow upon his native State. Poor New 
London and the heroic Ledyard are now to pay the penalty 
of withstanding the audacious traitor, by the burning of their 
town and the brutal massacre of the garrison and its 
commander. 

But no diversion or interruption of Washington's plans 
could be effected in that way or in any other way; and at 
length those plans are divulged and executed under circum- 
stances which give assurance of success, and which cannot be 
recalled, even at this late day, without an irrepressible thrill 
of delight and gratitude. 

"Felix ille dies, felix el diciturannus, 

Felices, qui taleui annum videre, diemque! " 

Leaving Philadelphia, with the Army, on the 5th of Sep- 
tember, Washington meets an express near Chester, announc- 
ing the arrival, in Chesapeake Bay, of the Count de Crasse, 
with a fleet of twenty-eight ships of the line, and with three 
thousand five hundred additional French troops, under the 
command of the Marquis de St. Simon, who had already been 
landed at Jamestown, with orders to join the Marquis de La- 
fayette! 

"The joy," says the Count William de Deux-Ponts in his 
precious journal, "the joy which this welcome news produces 



890 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

among all the troops, and which penetrates General Washing- 
ton and the Count de Rochambeau, is more easy to feel than 
to express." But, in a foot-note to that passage, he does ex- 
press and describe it, in terms which cannot be spared and 
could not be surpassed, and which add a new and charming 
illustration of the emotional side of Washington's nature. 
"I have been equally surprised and touched," says the gallant 
Deux-Ponts, "at the true and pure joy of General Washington. 
Of a natrual coldness and of a serious and noble approach, 
which in him is only true dignity, and which adorn so well 
the chief of a whole nation, his features, his physiognomy, his 
deportment, all were changed in an instant. He put aside 
his character as arbiter of North America, and contented him- 
self for a moment with that of a citizen, happy at the good 
fortune of his country. A child, whose every wish had been 
gratified, would not have experienced a sensation more lively, 
and I believe I am doing honor to the feelings of this rare 
man, in endeavoring to express all their ardor." 

Thanks to God, thanks to France, from all our hearts at 
this hour, for "this true and pure joy" which lightened the 
heart, and at once dispelled the anxieties of our incomparable 
leader. It may be true that Washington seldom smiled after 
he had accepted the command of the Revolutionary Army, 
but it is clear that on that 5th of September he not only 
smiled but played the boy. The arrival of that magnificent 
BYench fleet, with so considerable a reinforcement of French 
troops, gave him a relief and a rapture which no natural 
reserve or official dignity could restrain or conceal, and of 
which he gave au impulsive manifestation by swinging his own 
chapeau in welcoming Rochambeau at the wharf. In Wash- 
ington's exuberant joy we have a measure, which nothing else 
could supply, of the value and importance of the timely suc- 
cors which awakened it. Thanks, thanks to France, and 
thanks to God, for vouchsafing to Washington at last that 
happy day, which his matchless fortitude and patriotism so 
richly deserved, and which, after so many trials and discour- 
agements, he so greatly needed. 

"All now went merry," 'with him, "as a marriage bell." 



ORATION— ROBERT C. WINTHROP. 801 

Under the immediate influence of this joy, which ho had 
returned for a few hours to Philadelphia to communicate in 

person to Congress, where all the thirteen hats must have 
come off again with three times thirteen cheers, and while 
the Allied Annies arc hurrying Southward, he makes a hasty 
trip with Colonel Humphreys, to his beloved Mt. Vernon and 
his more beloved wife, — bis first visit home since lie left it 
for Cambridge in '75. Rochambeau with bis suite joins him 
there on the 10th, and Chastellux and bis aids on the 11th; 
and there, with Mrs. Washington, lie dispenses, for two days, 
"a princely hospitality" to his foreign guests. But the L3th 
finds them all on their way to rejoin the army at Williamsburg, 
where they arrive on the loth "to the great joy of the troops 
and the people," and where they dine with the Marquis de St. 
Simon. On the 18th, Washington and Llochambeau, with 
Knox and Chastellux and Du Portail, and with two of Wash- 
ington's aids, Colonel Cobb, of Massachusetts, and Colonel 
Jonathan Trumbull, Jr., of Connecticut, embark on the 
"Princess Charlotte" for a visit to the French tleet; and early 
the next morning they are greeted with "the grand sight of 
thirty-two ships of the line,"— for De Barras from Newport 
had joined De Grasse, with his four ships, magnanimously 
waiving his own seniority in rank, — "in Lynn Haven Bay, 
just under the point of Cape Henry." They go on board the 
Admiral's ship — the famous " Ville de Paris," of one hundred 
and four guns, — for a visit of ceremony and consultation, and, 
at their departure, the Count de Grasse mans the yards of the 
whole fleet and tires salutes from all the ships. A few days 
more are spent at Williamsburg on their return, where they 
find General Lincoln already arrived with a part of the troops 
from the North, having hurried them, as Washington be- 
sought him, "on the wings of speed," — and where the word is 
soon given, "On, on, to York and Gloucester!" 

Washington takes his share of the exposure of this march, 
and the night of the 28th of September finds him, with all his 
military family, sleeping in an open held, within two mil.- of 
Yorktown, without any other covering, as the journal of one 
of his aids states, "than the canopy of the heavens, and the 



892 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

small spreading branches of a tree," which, the writer predicts, 
"will probably be rendered venerable from this circumstance 
for a length of time to come." Yes, venerable, or, certainly, 
memorable, forever, if it were known to be in existence. You 
will all agree with me, my friends, that if that tree, which 
overshadowed Washington sleeping in the open air on his way 
to Yorktown, were standing to-day — if it had escaped the 
necessities and casualties of the siege, and were not cut-down 
for the abattis of a redoubt, or for camp-fires and cooking- 
fires, long ago — if it could anyhow be found and identified 
in yonder Beech Wood, or Locust Grove, or Carter's Grove, 
— no Wellington Beech or Napoleon Willow, no Milton or 
even Shakespeare Mulberry, no Oak of William the Conrpieror 
at' Windsor, or of Henri IV. at Fontainebleau, nor even 
those historic trees which gave refuge to the fugitive Charles 
II., or furnished a hiding place for the Charter which he 
granted to Connecticut on his Eestoration, would be so pre- 
cious and so hallowed in all American eyes and hearts to the 
latest generation.* 

Everything now hurries, almost with the rush of a Niagara 
cataract, to the grand fall of Arbitrary Power in America. 
Lord Cornwallis had taken post here at Yorktown as early as 
the 4th of August, after being foiled so often by "that boy," 
as he called Lafayette, whose Virginia campaign of four 
months was the most effective preparation for all that was to 
follow, and who, with singular foresight, perceived at once 
that his lordship was now fairly entrapped, and wrote to 
Washington, as early as the 21st of August, that "the British 
army must be forced to surrender." Day by day, night by 
night, that prediction presses forward to its fulfilment. The 
1st of October finds our engineers reconnoitring the j)osition 
and works of the enemy. The 2d witnesses the gallantry 
of the Duke de Lauzun and his legion in driving back Tarle- 
ton, whose raids had so long been the terror of Virginia and 
the Caroliuas. On the Oth, the Allied Armies broke ground 
for their first parallel, and proceeded to mount their batteries 

* Washington Irving says it was a Mulberry. 



ORATION -ROBERT C. WINTHKOP. 893 

on the 7th and 8th. On the 9th, two batteries were opened,— 
Washington himself applying the torch to the first gun; and 
on the 10th, three or four more were in play,— " silencing the 
enemy's works, and making," says the little diary of Colonel 
Cobb, "most noble music." On the 11th, the indefatigable 
Baron Steuben was breaking the ground for our second par- 
allel, within less than four hundred yards of the enemy, 
which was finished next morning, and more batteries mounted 
on the 13th and 14th. 

But the great achievement of the siege still awaits its ac- 
complishment. Two formidable British advanced redoubts arc 
blocking the way to any further approach, and they must, he 
stormed. The allied troops divide the danger and the glory 
between them, and emulate each other in the assault. One 
of these redoubts is assigned to the French grenadiers and 
chasseurs, under the general command of the Baron de Vio- 
mesnil. The other is assigned to the American light infantry, 
under the general command of Lafayette. But the detail of spe- 
cial leaders to conduct the two assaults remains to be arranged. 
Viomesnil readily designates the brave Count William to lead 
the French storming party, who, though he came oil' from 
his victory wounded, counts it "the happiest day of his life." 
A question arises as to the American party, which is soon 
solved by the impetuous but just demand of our young Alex- 
ander Hamilton to lead it. And lead it he did, with an in- 
trepidity, a heroism, and a dash, unsurpassed in the whole 
history of the war. The French troops had the largest re- 
doubt to assail, and were obliged to pause a little for the regu- 
lar sappers and miners to sweep away the abattis. But Ham- 
ilton rushed on to the front of his redoubt with his right wing. 
led by Colonel Gimat and seconded by .Major Nicholas 
Fish, heedless of all impediments, overleaping palisades and 
abattis, and scaling the parapets, — while the chivalrous John 
Laurens was taking the garrison in reverse. Both redoubts 
were soon captured; and these brilliant actions virtually 
sealed the fate of Cornwallis. "A small and precipitate 
sortie," as Washington calls it, was made by the British on 
the following evening, resulting in nothing; and the next 



894 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

day a vain attempt to evacuate their works, and to escape by 
crossing over to Gloucester, was defeated by a violent and, 
for us, most providential storm of rain and wind, — of which 
the elements favored us with a Centennial reminiscence last 
night. Meantime, not less than a hundred pieces of our heavy 
ordnance were in continual operation, and " the whole peninsula 
trembled under the incessant thunderings of our infernal 
machines." Would that no machines more truly "infernal" 
had brought disgrace on any part of our land in these latter 
days! But these brought victory at that day. A suspen- 
sion of hostilities, to arrange terms of capitulation, was pro- 
posed by Cornwallis on the 17th; the 18th was occupied at 
Moore's House in settling those terms; and on the 19th the 
articles were signed by which the garrisons of York and 
Gloucester, together with all the officers and seamen of the 
British ships in the Chesapeake," surrender themselves Pris- 
oners of War to the Combined Forces of America and France." 

And now, Fellow-Citizens, there follows a scene than 
which nothing more unique and picturesque has ever been 
witnessed on this continent, or anywhere else beneath the 
sun. Art has assayed in vain to depict it. Trumbull — 
whose brother, not he himself, was an eye-witness of it 
as one of Washington's aids — has done his best with it; 
and his picture in the Rotunda of the Capitol is full of 
interest and value, giving the portraits of the officers present, 
as carefully taken by himself from the originals. John 
FYancis Renault, too — assistant secretary of the Count de 
Grasse, and an engineer of the French Forces — has left us a 
contemporaneous engraved sketch of it, which has quite as 
many elements of fancy as of truth. In this engraving all 
the officers are on foot, while Trumbull has rightly put most 
of them on horseback. Meantime, Renault not only gives 
Cornwallis surrending his sword in person, though we all know 
that he did not leave his quarters on that occasion, but looks 
forward a full century and exhibits in the background the 
Column which ought to have been here long ago, but of 
which the corner-stone was only laid yesterday! 

Standing here, however, on the very spot to-day, with the 



ORATIOtf — ROBERT C. WINTHROP. Mi., 

records of history in our hands,— as summed up in the brilliant 
volumes of Bancroft and Irving, or scattered through the 
writings of Sparks, or spread in detail over the " Field Book" 
of Lossing, or on the more recent pages of Carrington's 
"Battles of the Revolution" and Austin Stevens's American 
Historical Magazine, not forgetting the precious journals and 
diaries of Thacher and Trumbull and Cobb, of Deux-Ponts 
and the Abbe Robin, and of Washington himself, nor that of 
the humbler Anspach Sergeant in the " Life of Steubefh," — 
we require no aid of art, or even of imagination, to call hark, 
in all its varied and most impressive details, a scene, which, 
as we dip our brush to paint it now, at the end of a hundred 
years, seems almost like a tale of Fairy-Land. 

We see the grand French Army drawn up for upwards of 
a mile in battle array, ten full regiments, including a Legion 
of cavalry with a Corps of Royal Engineers, — Bourbonnaisand 
Soissonais, Royal Deux-Ponts, Saintongeand Dillon, who have 
come from Newport, — with the Tourraine, the Auxonne, the 
Agenais, and the Gatinais, soon to win back the name of the 
Royal Auvergne, who had just lauded from the fleet. They 
are all in their unsoiled uniforms of snowy white, with their 
distinguishing collars and lappelsof yellow, and violet, and 
crimson, and green, and pink, with the Fleur de Lis proudly 
emblazoned on their white silk regimental standards, with 
glittering stars and badges on their officers' breasts, and with 
dazzling gold and silver laced liveries on their private servants, 
—the timbrel with its associations and tones of triumph, then 
"a delightful novelty," lending unaccustomed brilliancy to 
the music of their bands! 

Opposite, and face to face, to that splendid line, we see our 
own war-worn American Army; — the regulars, if we had any- 
thing which could be called regulars, in front, clad in the dear 
old Continental uniform, still "in passable condition;" a New 
York brigade, a Maryland brigade; the Pennsylvania Line; 
the light companies made up from Xew Hampshire, Connecti- 
cut, and Massachusetts; a Rhode Island and New Jersey bat- 
talion with two companies from Delaware; the Canadian 
Volunteers; a park of Artillery with sappers ami miners; ami 



B!)C- OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

with a large mass of patriotic Virginian militia, collected and 
commanded by the admirable Governor Nelson. Not quite all 
the Colonies, perhaps, were represented in force, as they had 
been at Germantown, but hardly any of them were without 
some representation, individual if not collective, — many of. 
them in simple, homespun, every-day wear, many of their 
dresses bearing witness to the long, hard service they had 
seen, — coats out at the elbow, shoes out at the toe, and in some 
cases no coats, no shoes, at all. But the Stars and Stripes, 
which had been raised first at Saratoga, floated proudly above 
their heads, and no color blindness on that day mistook their 
tints, misinterpreted their teachings, or failed to recognize 
the union they betokened and the glory they foreshadowed! 

Between these two lines of the Allied Forces, so strikingly 
and strangely contrasted, the British Army, in their rich 
scarlet coats, freshly distributed from supplies which must 
otherwise have been delivered up as spoils to the victors, and 
with their Anspach, and Hessian, and "Von Bose" auxiliaries 
in blue, are now seen filing— their muskets at shoulder, " their 
colors cased," and their drums heating "a British or German 
march," — passing on to the field assigned them for giving up 
their standards and grounding their arms, and then filing back 
again to their quarters. There is a tradition that their bands 
played an old English air, "The World is Turning Upside 
Down," as they well might have done, and that the American 
fifes and drums struck up " Yankee Doodle." But all such 
traditions are untrustworthy, and no such incidents are needed 
to give the most vivid effect and lifelike reality to that impos- 
ing picture of a hundred years ago. 

We would not, if we could, my friends, recall at this hour 
anything which should even seem like casting reproach or 
indignity upon the armies or the rulers of old Mother England 
at that day or at any day. She did what any other nation 
would have done, our own not excepted, to hold fast her 
possessions, and to avert so serious a disruption of her Empire. 
And if she did it unwisely, unjustly, tyrannically, as so many 
of her great statesmen at the time declared, and as so many 
of her later historians and ministers have admitted, we may 



ORATION— ROBERT C. WINTHROP. 897 

well remember that the principles and methods of free govern- 
ment were but little understood by kings or cabinets of that 
age. How unjust to carry back and apply the opinions and 
principles of a later to a former century! Who doubts that 
good old George HI. spoke from his conscience as well as from 
his heart, when he said so touchingly to .John Adams, on 
receiving him as the first American Minister at the Court of 
St. James, "I bare done nothing in the late contest but what 
I thought myself indispensably bound to do by the duty which 
I owed my people?" We are here to revive no animosities 
resulting from the War of the Revolution, or from any other 
war, remote or recent; — rather to bury and drown them all, 
deeper than ever plummet sounded. For all that is grand 
and glorious in the career and example of Great Britain, 
certainly we can entertain nothing but respect and admiration; 
while I hazard little in saying, that for the continued life and 
welfare of her illustrious sovereign, whom neither Anne nor 
Elizabeth will outshine in history, the American heart beats as 
warmly this day as if no Yorktown had ever occurred, and no 
Independence had ever separated us from her imperial domin- 
ion. And we are ready to say, and do say, "God save the 
Queen," as sincerely and earnestly as she herself and her 
ministers and her people have said, "God save the President," 
in those recent hours of his agony! 

There is a tradition that when shouts of triumph were 
beginning to resound, as the scene which I have so feebly 
portrayed went on, Washington himself restrained and rebuked 
them, exclaiming, " Let posterity cheer for us!" The phrase 
does not altogether sound to me like his. But my late ac- 
complished friend, Lord Stanhope, in his valuable history of 
that period, bears testimony to a similar incident. "Yet 
Washington," he says, "with his usual lofty spirit, had no 
desire to aggravate the anguish and humiliation of honorable 
foes. On the contrary, he bade all spectators keep aloof 
from the ceremony, and suppressed all public signs of exul- 
tation." 

And let us not fail to remember that England paid us the 
compliment of sending over the bravest and best of her soldiers 



898 OIK NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

and officers, to this and every other field of the American war. 
Howe, and Burgoyne, and Clinton, and Cornwallis were all 
foemen worthy of any steel. It certainly would not have 
detracted from the permanent fame of Cornwallis, — it would 
have added to it rather, could he have summoned up nerve 
enough to march manfully at the head of his troops and sur- 
render his sword to Washington in person. Yielding at last 
to superior force, for the Allied Army was double his own, — 
and without a cloud upon his courage, there was nothing for 
him to shrink from in such an act. But unstrung, as he 
evidently Avas, by the wear and tear of along suspense, and by 
the disappointing and vexatious delays of Sir Henry Clinton, 
whose promised reinforcements reached the Chesapeake four 
or five days too late, the plea of ill health was readily accepted. 
We may well leave it to Horace Walpole to call him "a rene- 
gade," as he does, for having obeyed his Sovereign by coming 
over to conquer America, after being one of a very few 
members in the House of Lords to enter a protest against some 
of the arbitrary acts or declarations which gave occasion to the 
war. We may leave it to Walpole, too, to tell the story of 
his having vowed, before he came, that "he would never pile 
up his arms like Burgoyne." The remembrance of such a 
vow, if he ever made it, would naturally have embarrassed 
and confused him at Yorktown, more especially if he recalled 
the vow while dating his original proposal to surrender — as he 
did — on the very anniversary of Burgoyne's surrender! But 
no malicious gossip of Strawberry Hill must prevent our recog- 
nition of Lord Cornwallis as a brave and accomplished offi- 
cer, the very ablest of all the British Generals in the American 
War, destined to the Governorship of Bengal a few years 
afterwards, and later to the Governor-Generalship of all India, 
where he was not only to receive the jewelled sword of Tippoo 
Saib, after the great victory at Seringapatam, but was to win 
the higher honor of being called "the first honest and incor- 
ruptible governor India ever saw, after whose example hardly 
any governor has dared to contemplate corruption. Other 
governors," it is added, "were conquerors, so was he; but his 
victories in the field, and they were brilliant, are dim beside 



ORATION— ROBERT C. WINTHROP. 899 

his victory over corruption." Nor is it a much less enviable 
distinction for him, that, as Lord Lieutenant of Ireland, 
while it was the scene of a rebellion, he pacified the Irish by 
conciliatory and moderate measures. We should all rejoice, 
I am sure, if a similar tribute should be won, as it seems so 
likely to be, by tb.3 present Lord Lieutenant, under the lead 
of the eloquent and accomplished Gladstone. 

There were other British officers here destined to great dis- 
tinction. Among them was Lieutenant-Colonel Abercrombv, 
who led the little sortie on the night before the Capitulation 
was tendered, who had commanded a regiment during the 
whole War, who succeeded Corn wallis as Commander-in-Chief 
of the forces in India, and died, as Sir Robert Abercrombv, 
the oldest General in the service, in 182-7. 

Among them, too, was the young Lord Rawdon, who had 
been conspicuous at Bunker Hill, when hardly of age, and 
who had played a distinguished part at Camden. He was 
here only as an enforced spectator, however, — having been 
brought to the Chesapeake as a prisoner of war by I )e Grasse, 
who had captured him a few weeks before on board a Charles- 
ton packet. He went home at last to be Earl of Moira and 
Marquis of Hastings, and like Cornwallis, Governor-General 
of India. His name may well be recalled, as adding another 
to the remarkable number of notabilities of all countries, who 
were more or less associated with York town. 

And, indeed, but for the delays of Sir Henry Clinton, (lie 
young Prince William Henry, afterwards William IV., then a 
midshipman in the British fleet here, might, perchance, have 
added something even of Royal dignify to the scene. 

But I must not forget the second in command on this field, 
who led up the British forces to the formal surrender, bring- 
ing the sword of Cornwallis in his hand, — the gallant and 
genial Brigadier Charles O'Hara; a man of singular elegance 
and personal beauty; a strict and thorough disciplinarian; 
the special friend of that General Conway, afterwards Field- 
Marshal Conway, whose efforts against the Stain]) Act, and 
to put an end to the War, secured him not only the respect 
of all America, but/even a portrait in Faneuil Hall, — which, 



000 OUR NATIONAL JUTHLEE. 

alas, the British soldiers destroyed or carried away at the 
evacuation of Boston. O'Hara went home to be wounded at 
the siege of Toulon in 1792, and to die ten years later as 
Governor of Gibraltar. It was of him that it is said in "Cyril 
Thornton,'' — a favorite novel half a century ago, — by an author 
who knew him well, — "His appearance was of that striking 
cast, which once seen, is not easily forgotten. General O'Hara 
was the most perfect specimen I ever saw of the' soldier and 
conrtier of the last age. Notwithstanding the strictness of 
discipline which he scrupulously enforced, no officer could be 
more universally popular. The honors of the table were done 
by his staff, and the General was in nothing distinguished 
from those around him, except by being undoubtedly the gay- 
est and most agreeable person in the company." It may not 
be less interesting to recall the fact, that he was on the point 
of being married, in 1795, to Miss Mary Berry, — Horace Wal- 
pole's Miss Berry, — so celebrated in the social history of 
London, who lived to be ninety, and who, forty-eight years 
after the engagement was broken, reopened the packet of 
letters which had passed betvven them, and left a touching 
record, which is in her published Memoirs, of "the disap- 
pointed hopes and blighted affecitons that had deepened the 
natural vein of sadness in her character." Whatever mis- 
understandings or mistakes may have broken off the match, 
to the great sorrow of them both, it is certainly nowhere sug- 
gested that the lady thought any the worse of her lover, 
because he had been the dignified and graceful bearer of Corn- 
wallis's sword to Washington. This gay, agreeable person 
dined here with Washington at head-quarters, on the very day 
of the Surrender; and Col. Trumbull makes special note in 
his Diary that "he was very social and easy." 

But I turn at once from anything sentimental or romantic 
to others of the real, substantial actors of the day. And there 
could surely be nothing more real, or more substantial, than 
the American General now deputed by Washington to receive 
the sword from O'Hara's hand, and to conduct him and the 
British host to the field for laving down their arms, — the 
sturdy, stalwart Bknmamin Lincoln, of Massachusetts, the 



ORATION — ROBERT C. WINTHROP. 1)01 

senior American Major-General on the ground, nearly fifty 
years of age and of a plump and portly figure, who had con- 
ducted the Northern Army to this place, bad occupied the 
right of the lino, at Wormeley's Creek, during the siege, and 
who is now instructed to mete out to the surrendering forces 
the same precise measure of consideration and honor which 
Clinton and Cornwallis had meted out to him, at his recent 
capitulation of Charleston. A few months afterwards he was 
elected by Congress the first Secretary of War of the United 
States, and had the privilege, in that capacity, of presenting 
to Washington the two British Yorktown standards assigned 
to him by Congress, and of receiving from Washington, in 
reply, a most affectionate acknowledgement of "particular 
obligations for able and friendly counsel in the Cabinet and 
vigor in the field." Lincoln deserved it all for patriotic and 
persevering service during the whole Revolution. Nor will 
Massachusetts ever forget the invaluable aid which he rendered 
to Governor Bowdoin in the suppression of Shay's Rebellion 
in 1786-87. 

And here, too, from Massachusetts, — for I will finish the roll 
of my own State before passing to others, — was Henry Knox, 
Brigadier-General in command of the American Artillery, 
which he had organized and conducted from the siege of Boston 
to that of Yorktown, as stanch and as responsive as any one 
of the very field-pieces, whether six or twelve or eighteen or 
twenty-four pounders, which ho tended and trained up in the 
way they should go, as his own children; — who, as Chastellux 
bears witness, "seldom left the batteries, incessantly directing 
i he artillery, and often himself pointing the mortars;" whose 
energy and activity, in providing heavy cannon for this siege, 
led Washington to say of him, in the report to Congress which 
secured his promotion to a Major-Generalship, that " the re- 
sources of his genius supplied the deficit of means." He, also, 
Avas afterwards Secretary of War of the United States, succed- 
ing Lincoln in 1785, and serving in the cabinet of "Washington 
until his resignation in L794. 

And here, under Knox, as a Lieutenant-Colonel of Artillery, 
was the brave and devoted Ebenezer Stevens, like Knox, a 



002 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Boston boy, a son of Liberty, one of the Tea-party; whose 
services, here and elsewhere, were of the highest value, in con- 
nection with Colonel Lamb of New York, and Lieutenant- 
Colonel Carrington of Virignia, and Major Bauman; who 
lived to superintend the fortifications on Governor's Island, 
in New York Harbor, in 1800: and having fixed his residence 
in that city, to command the Artillery of the State in the War 
of 1S12. 

James Thacher, of old Plymouth, was here, as a Surgeon, 
— under Washington's favorite Surgeon, James Craik, of 
Virginia, — the author of an interesting "Military Journal" of 
the Involution, and among whose papers I have seen a rough 
sketch of the Surrender. Colonel Joseph Vose was here, some 
time at the head of the first Massachusetts Continental In- 
fantry, but now in Lafayette's corps. And David Cobb was 
here, in the enviable capacity of an Aid to Washington, who 
kept a little Diary on the field from which I have already 
quoted; who lived to hold both military and judicial office in 
Massachusetts, and who will always be associated with that 
brave saying of his, during Shay's Rebellion, — "I will sit as a 
Judge or die as a General." 

Colonel Timothy Pickering was here also, who from his 
first bold resistance to the British Troops at the Salem draw- 
bridge in '75, before Bunker Hill or even Concord and Lexing- 
ton, down to the end of the War, did memorable military 
service; who was with Washington in his famous retreat across 
the Jerseys, and was Adjutant-General at Brandywine and 
Germantown. He was here as Quarter-Master General of the 
American Army, and was afterwards Secretary of War and 
Secretary of State in Washington's Cabinet. 

But let me hasten to the representatives of other States. 

New Hampshire was represented here by Henry Dearborn, 
a brave and devoted officer from Bunker Hill to Yorktown, 
afterwards Secretary of W r ar to Jefferson and Commander-in- 
Chief of the Army, but here as Assistant Quarter-Master 
General to Pickering; and by Nicholas Gilman, afterwards a 
member of the Continental Congress, at Philadelphia, and for 
many years a Representative and Senator in Congress under 



OUATION — ROBERT C. WINTHROP. 903 

the Constitution, but who now, as Deputy Adjutant-General, 
received from Lord Cornwallis, to whom lie was sent for the 
purpose by Washington, the return of exactly 7,050 men sur- 
rendered. But New Hampshire may claim the distinction of 
having sent to this field its most distinguished victim, the 
lamented young Alexander Scammell, who, though ;i 
native of Massachusetts, and a graduate of Harvard, was here 
in immediate command of New Hampshire troops; who, sur- 
prised while out with a reconnoitring party, in an early stage 
of the siege, was mortally and basely wounded by his captors; 
and of whose death on the 6th of September, it is said by 
Henry Lee of Virginia, in his "Memoirs of the War," "This 
was the severest blow experienced by the allied army, through- 
out the siege; not an officer in our army surpassed in personal 
worth and professional ability this experienced soldier." 

Connecticut was represented here by Lieutenant-Colonel 
Ebenezer Huntington and Major John Palsgrave Wyllis, and 
especially by Colonel Jonathan Trumbull, Jr., a Secretary and 
Aide-de-Camp of Washington, and the son of the great 
Revolutionary War Governor, Jonathan Trumbull, — and by 
Colonel David Humphreys, another and most valued member 
of Washington's military family, to whose care the captured 
standards of the surrending Army were consigned, Avho received 
a sword from Congress in acknowledgment of his fidelity and 
ability, and to whom Washington presented the epaulettes 
worn by himself throughout the war, — now among the 
treasures of the Massachusetts Historical Society; — afterwards 
a minister to Portugal and to Spain; one of the earliest im- 
porters of merino sheep ; a miscellaneous and somewhat prolific 
poet; and who commanded the Militia of Connecticut in the 
War of 1812. 

Rhode Island was represented here by Colonel Jeremiah 
Olney, at the head of one of her regiments, and by his distant 
relative, the gallant Captain Stephen Olney, who was the first 
to mount the parapet and form his company in Hamilton's 
redoubt on the 14th. 

New Jersey was represented here by Elias Dayton, Francis 
Barber, and Matthias Ogden, at the head of her regiment of 



904 OUR NATIONAL .JUBILEE. 

Continental Infantry, as well as by Colonel Aaron Ogden, 
afterwards United States Senator and Governor of the State. 

Pennsylvania was represented here by General Peter Muhlen- 
berg, — a relative of the first Speaker of the House of Repre- 
sentatives of the United States, — who had thrown off his gown, 
as a Lutheran preacher, in '70, in Virginia, "to organize out 
of his several congregations one of the most perfect battalions 
in the army;" — by Adjutant-General Edward Hand and 
Colonel Walter Stewart, — by Brodhead, and Moylan, and the 
two Butlers, at the head of her regiments, and Parr at the 
head of her Rifle Battalion; — by Arthur St. Clair, born in 
Scotland, grandson of an Earl of Rosslyn, who had been with 
Amherst at Louisburgh, and with Wolfe at Quebec, who is 
here as a volunteer in Washington's military family, after- 
wards to be President of the Continental Congress; — and, 
pre-eminently, by Anthony Wayne, the hero of Stony 
Point, "Mad Anthony," as he was sometimes called, here in 
command of the Pennsylvania line, and who died, in 1790, as 
Commander-in-Chief of the United States Army. 

Maryland was represented here by General Mordecai Gist, 
by Adams and Woolford and Moore and Roxburgh, in com- 
mand of her regiments and battalions, and more especially by 
Colonel Tench Tilghman, a favorite Aid of Washington, 
who was deputed by him to bear the tidings of the surrender 
to Congress. 

New York was represented here by James Clinton, a brother 
of Vice-President George Clinton, — whose statue is now in 
the rotunda of the Capitol, — and the father of the eminent De 
Witt Clinton; who, himself, having served as a Captain in 
the old French War, and as a colonel under the lamented Mont- 
gomery in 1775, was now, as Major-General, in command of 
New York, New Jersey, and Rhode Island troops, with Van 
Schaick, and Van Dyck, and Van Cortlandt as his Colonels. 
But New York had other representatives on this field, lower 
in grade, but one of them, at least, second to none of her 
soldiers or citizens, either in immediate estimation or in future 
eminence. Alexander Hamilton was here, I need hardly 
repeat, commanding a battalion of Lafayette's light infantry, 



ORATION— ROBERT C. WIXTIIROP. 905 

unci who by his heroism at the redoubt, as we have seen had 
been one of the most conspicuous contributors to the result 
of which he was now a witness. Destined to so early and 
brilliant a career in the Convention which framed the Constitu- 
tion, as one of the principal writers of the "Federalist," and 
as the organizer of our financial system in the Cabinet of 
Washington, he is a bright particular star, with no lessening 
ray on the field of Yorktown, never to be lost sight of in the 
history of our country. Nor must his friend and fellow officer 
of the light infantry battalion, — Major Nicholas Fish, — fail 
to be mentioned, who shared with him the perils of the storm- 
ing party, who lived a pure, patriotic, and useful life, and 
who gave the name of Hamilton to a son, whose recent dis- 
charge- of the duties of Secretary of State has added fresh 
distinction to the name. 

I cannot pass from the name of Hamilton without recalling 
at once that heroic representative of South Carolina who was 
here with him, and who was hardly second in interest — to 
every American eye, certainly — to any other figure on this 
field: — the young John Laurens, often called "the Bayard 
of the American Revolution," — son of Henry Laurens, once 
President of the Continental Congress, but at this moment a 
prisoner in the Tower of London, of which, by a striking 
coincidence, Lord Cornwallis was the titular Constable. After 
having served on the staff of Washington, — who "loved him 
as a son," and who said of him that "he had not a fault that 
he could discover, unless it was an intrepidity bordering on 
rashness," — he had now just returned from a confidential and 
successful mission to France, for which he had received the 
thanks of Congress. He was with Hamilton in storming the 
redoubt, and had the signal distinction of being one of the two 
commissioners, with the Vicomte de Noailles, the brother-in- 
law of Lafayette, to arrange the terms of the surrender, at 
Moore's House, with Colonel Dundas and Colonel Ross of the 
British Army. His untimely death, at only twenty-eight 
years of age, within a year afterwards, in a petty skirmish in 
South Carolina, while serving under General Greene, produced 
a shock throughtout the whole country. Roland, at Ronces- 



906 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

vallcs, jnst a thousand years before, did not leave a more 
fragrant and enduring memory. It has been well said of him 
that "of all the youthful soldiers of the Revolution, there is 
not one upon whose story the recollections of his contemporaries 
have more fondly dwelt." There was no one of his period 
for whom the highest honors of our land might have been 
more safely predicted; no one in whose ear it might have 
been more confidently whispered a hundred years ago to-day: 

" Si qua fata aspera rumpas, 
Tu Marcellus eris! " 

His father nobly said, on hearing of his death, just after his 
own release from the Tower, " I thank God I had a son who 
dared to die for his country." 

The soldiers of South Carolina, at the moment of this siege, 
had enough to do at home in defense of their own firesides and 
families, — of which the Battle Flag of their gallant William 
Washington, borne by him at the Cowpens and at Eutaw, and 
ordered by the Governor of the State to be brought here by 
the old Washington Light Infantry of Charleston, is a touch- 
ing and precious reminder. But one such representative of 
the State on this field as John Laurens, is enough to secure 
her a proud and distinguished place in the memories of this 
anniversary. 

Nor was the Canada of that day without a worthy repre- 
sentative here in the person of Colonel Moses Hazen, who had 
been wounded under Wolfe on the heights of Quebec, who 
rendered valuable service to the end of our war, and was pro- 
moted to be a Brigadier-General of our army, but was here 
in command of a regiment of Canadians, recruited by himself, 
sometimes called " Congress's Own" and sometimes " Hazen's 
Own." 

And now, Fellow-Citizens, let me by no means proceed 
further without naming, with every degree of emphasis and 
distinction, that sterling soldier and thorough disciplinarian, 
who had been an aide-de-camp of Frederick the Great, and 
served at the celebrated siege of Schweidnitz in Prussia, but 
who joined the American Army in 1777, and drilled, and dis- 



ORATION — ROBERT 0. WTNTHROP. 007 

eiplined, and fairly reorganized it, so untiringly and so effect- 
ively, at Valley Forge, — Major-General Baron von Steuben". 
He was here in command of the combined division of Virginia, 
Maryland, and Pennsylvania troops, and as Inspector-General 
of the Army of the United States. It fell to his lot to receive 
the first overture of capitulation while on his tour of duty in 
the trendies, and he resolutely refused to leave those trenches 
till the British Hag was struck. The very last letter which 
Washington wrote as Commander-in-Chief, dated on the very 
day of his resignation at Annapolis, was a letter of compli- 
ment and gratitude to Steuben; and to no one did Washing- 
ton or the American Army owe more than they owed to him. 
All honor to the memory of the brave old German soldier 
from every heart and lip here gathered, and a cordial welcome 
to the representatives of his family who have accepted the invi- 
tation of the United States to assist at this Commemoration! 

And in the same connection maybe justly named Brigadier- 
General Chevalier Du Portail, who commanded the engineers 
on this field," and who, on Washington's special recommenda- 
tion, was promoted by Congress, for his services at the siege, 
to be a Major-General of the United States Army. 

These, I believe, were the only two distinguished foreign 
officers, — apart entirely from Lafayette and the French auxili- 
ary officers — who were present at Yorktown. Pulaski had 
fallen two years before at Savannah; De Kalis, a year before, 
at Camden; while Kosciusko was still at the South with 
General Greene, where he succeeded the lamented Laurens; — 
all three of them brave, heroic men, whose names can never 
be omitted from the roll of honor of the American Revolution. 

Such, Fellow-Citizens, were the principal officers, from 
other States and other parts of the country and of the world, 
who were gathered on this Virginia iield, in immediate associa- 
tion with the American Line. 

Opposite to them, in that splendid French Line, stood the 
gallant strangers who had been so generously sent to our aid. 

Here, at the head of them, was the veteran Count de 
ItOCHAMUEAU, now in the fifty-sixth year of his age, and in the 



908 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

thirty-ninth year of his service, who had long been known 
and noted for his bravery in the wars of the Continent. Cool, 
prudent, reserved, conciliatory, no one could have been more 
perfectly suited to the delicate duties which devolved upon 
him in co-operating with an army of a different land and 
language, and no one could have discharged those duties more 
faithfully. Perhaps his very ignorance of the English tongue 
was a positive safeguard and advantage for him: it certainly 
saved him from hearing or saying any rash or foolish things. 
Washington bore witness, in the letter bidding him farewell, 
to the high sense he entertained of the invaluable services he 
had rendered "by the constant attention he had paid to the 
interests of the American cause, by the exact order and 
discipline of the corps under his command, and by his read- 
iness at all times to give facility to every measure to which the 
force of the combined armies was competent." Congress pre- 
sented to him two of the captured cannon, with suitable inscrip- 
tions and devices, — which long adorned the family chateau in 
the Vendome, — in testimony of the illustrious" part he had 
played here. His name on the still-delayed Column — one of only 
three names in the originally prescribed inscription — will soon 
be engraved where all the world can read it. Returning home 
at the close of our war, he received the highest honors from 
his sovereign ; was Governor successively of Picardy and Alsace ; 
commanded the French Army of the North; and in 1791 was 
made a Marshal of France. Narrowly escaping the guillotine 
of Robespierre, he lived to receive the cordon of Grand Officer 
of the Legion of Honor from Napoleon, and died in 1807, at 
eighty-two years of age. We welcome the presence of his 
representative, the Marquis de Rochambeau, at this festival, 
and of Madame la Marquise, here happily at my side, and offer 
them the cordial recognition which is due to their name and 
rank. 

Here, in equal rank and honor with Rochambeau, stood the 
Count de Ghasse, in the fifty-eighth year of his age; who was 
associated with our War for Independence hardly more than 
a month, but who during that momentous mouth did enough 
to secure our lasting respect and gratitude; whose services, as 



ORATION — ROBERT C. W1NTTIIROP. 009 

Lieu tenant-General and Admiral of the Naval Army and 
Fleet of France, in yonder bay, were second in importance to 
none in the whole siege; to whom Washington did not hesitate 
to write, the very day after the event: "The surrender of 
York, from which so great glory and advantage are derived 
to the Allies, and the honor of which belongs to your Excel- 
lency." The sympathies of all his companions here were 
deeply stirred, when, losing his famous flagship and a large 
part of his fleet on his way home, he reached England as a 
prisoner of Admiral Rodney, to be released oidy after our 
Treaty of Peace was signed; and, though he had vindicated 
his conduct before a court-martial demanded by himself, to die 
in retirement after a few years, without having regained the 
favor of a sovereign, who could pardon anything and everything 
but defeat. Honor this day to the memory of the brave Count 
de Grasse, whose name, as Washington wrote to Rochambeau 
on hearing of his death, "will be long deservedly dear to this 
country!" 

Here, second in command of the French Line, was that 
worthy and excellent General, the Baron de Viomesnil, who 
brought a gallant brother, the Viscount, with him, and who 
himself returned home "to be killed before the last rampart 
of Constitutional Royalty," on the 10th of August, 1792. 

Here, in hardly inferior rank, was Major-General the 
Marquis de Chastellux; genial, brilliant, accomplished, the 
Journal of whose tour in America — indifferently translated 
and scandalously annotated by an English adventurer — is full 
of the liveliest interest; who returned home to be one of the 
immortal Forty of the French Academy, welcomed by a 
discourse of Buffon on Taste; and, better still, to receive one 
of the very few humorous and playful letters which Washing- 
ton ever wrote, — bantering him "on his catching that terrible 
contagion, domestic felicity," which, alas! he only lived to 
enjoy for six years. Washington had before written to him, 
soon after his return home: "lean truly say, that never in 
my life have I parted with a man to whom my soul clave more 
sincerely than it did to you." 

The Admiral Count de Barras was here,— the senior naval 



910 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

officer of France at the siege, but who generously waived his 
seniority; who was privileged, however, to sign the Articles of 
Capitulation for himself and the Count de Grasse; who was 
fortunate enough to escape any share in the defeat by Eodney; 
who reached home in season to be promoted, and then to die 
before the outbreak of a Revolution in which his nephew, of 
the same name, was famous as a Jacobin and regicide, and 
afterwards as tbe head of tbe Directory. 

The magnificent Duke deLAUZUN was here, conspicuous by 
his tall hussar cap and plume, — afterwards Duke de Biron, 
— a gay Lothario in the salon, but dauntless in the field, who, 
at the head of his legion, put Tarleton himself to flight; but 
who returned home to be, in 1793, one of the victims of the 
guillotine. 

Two of the Laval-Montmorencys were here: the Marquis, 
at the head of the Bourbonnais regiment; and his young son, 
the Viscount Matthieu, afterwards the Duke de Montmorency, 
— an initmate friend of Madame de Stael, long a resident at 
Coppet, and who was eminently distinguished, in later years, 
for his accomplishments and his philanthropy. 

The young Count Axel de Fersen was here, — a Swedish 
nobleman, an Aid to Rochambeau, "the Adonis of the camp;" 
who returned to France to become a suitor of Madame de Stael 
and a favorite of Marie Antoinette; — to whose zeal in aiding 
the flight of the King and Queen, with "a glass-coach and a 
new berliuc," himself on the box, Caiiyle devotes an early and 
humorous chapter of his "French Revolution," — and who 
was killed at last by a mob in Stockholm, in 1811), on an 
unfounded charge of having been privy to the murder of a 
popular prince. 

The brave young Duke de Rouerie was here, under the 
modest title of Colonel Arm and, who, after good service in 
our cause for two years, had sailed for France in February, 
1781, but had returned in September in season to be at the 
siege, and was a volunteer at the capture of one of the 
redoubts. Before the war was over he was made a Brigadier 
General on the special recommendation of Washington. Ho 
went home at last to be a prisoner in the Bastille, and to die 



ORATION — ROBERT C. WINTIIROP. Dll 

of fever or of poison, in a forest, to which lie had fled from 
Danton and Robespierre. 

The Marquis de St. Simon, we know, was here, in com- 
mand of the whole splendid corps, just landed from the fleet, 
called by Rochambeau "one of the bravest men that lived;" 
wounded while commanding in the French trenches, but who 
insisted on being carried to the assault at the head of his troops; 
wbo, after our war was ended, entered the service of Spain, 
and, after various fortunes, died a Captain-General of that 
Kingdom. 

But a second Marquis de St. Simon was here also, of still 
greater historic notoriety, — a young soldier of twenty-one, 
who had been a pupil of D'Alembert; who lived to be the 
proposer to the Viceroy of Mexico of a canal to unite the 
Atlantic and the Pacific; and to be the author of a scheme 
for the fundamental reconstruction of society; the founder of 
St. Simonianism, with Comtefor a time as one of his disciples, 
and whose published works fill not less than twenty vol- 
umes. 

And here was the Count Matthieu Dumas, another of 
Rochambeau's aids, who bore a conspicuous part at one of 
the redoubts, and was one of the first to enter it, who returned 
home to be a member of the Assembly and a peer of France; 
whose last military service was with Napoleon at Waterloo, 
and who, in 1830, gave active assistance to Lafayette in plac- 
ing Louis Philippe on the throne, — dying at eighty-four years 
of age. 

Count Charles de Lameth was here, too, as an Adjutant- 
General, and was severely wounded at the storming of the re- 
doubts, who afterwards served in the French army of the 
North till the memorable 10th of August, 1792, became a 
Deputy at the Restoration, and was living as late as 1832. 

But how can I attempt to portray the numerous, I had 
almost said the numberless, French officers of high name and 
family who were gathered on this field a hundred years ago, and 
who went home to so many strange fortunes, and not a few of 
them to such sad fates? It would require no small share of 
the genius which old Homer displayed in his wonderful cata- 



912 OUft NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

logue of the ships and forces which came to the siege of Troy, 
when Pope translates him as demanding of the Muses 

" A thousand tongues, 
A throat of brass and adamantine lungs! " 

Time certainly would fail me were I to give more than the 
names of General de Choisy and the Marquis de Kos- 
taing; of the Marquis and Count de Deux-Ponts; of 
the Counts de Custin and de Charlus, d' Audichamp and 
de Dillon, de l'Estrade, de St. Maime, and d'Olonne; of 
the Viscounts de Noailles and de Pondeux; of Admiral 
Destouches and Commodore the Count de Bougainville; of 
General Desandrouins and Colonel the Viscount d'Aboville; 
of Colonels de Querenet and Gimat, and Major Galvan; of 
M. de Menonville and the Marquis de Vauban; of M. de 
Beville and M. Blanchard; of Chevalier de la Vallette, M. de 
Bressolles, and M. de Broglie; of Chevalier, afterwards the 
Baron, Durand, a General of the French Army at the Kestora- 
tion; of M.de Montesquieu, son of the author of " L'Esprit 
des Lois;" of M. deMirabeau, brother of the matchless orator; 
of M. de Berthier, afterwards one of Napoleon's Chiefs of 
Staff, a Marshal of France, and Prince of Wagram. I must 
have omitted many who ought to be named in this numeration ; 
but enough have certainly been given to show what a cloud 
of witnesses and actors were here, whose names have since 
been celebrated in the annals of their own country, and which 
deserve a grateful mention in ours to-da}^ That famous 
"Field of Cloth of Gold," two centuries and a half before, 
when Francis I. and Henry VIII. met, in the valley of Ardres, 
to arrange an ominous family alliance, had hardly a more 
imposing representation of the nobles and notables of either 
land. 

And now all the officers I have mentioned, and many more, 
French and American, are assembled, with the troops to 
which they are attached, on this hallowed spot, to be met, 
and welcomed, and fraternized with, by at least thirty-five 
hundred Virginian militia men, — some of them under the 
command of the brave and excellent General Weedox, some 



oilATlON— ROISKRT (. W1NTHR0P. 913 

of them under Generals Edward Stevens ami Robert Lawson, 
some of them under Colonel Gibson and Lieutenant-Colonel 
Carrington of the Artillery, with SI. George Tucker, after- 
wards distinguished as an editor of Blaekstone and as a Judge, 
serving here as a Major; but all recognizing, as their Com- 
mander-in-Chief, the patriotic and noble-hearted Thom vs 
Nelson, then Governor of the State. A finer or firmer spirit 
did not breathe than that of Thomas Nelson, Junior, as he 
was then called, — who had served in the Continental Congress 
and signed the Declaration of Independence; who had been 
one of the largest contributors to the relief of Boston during 
her sufferings from the Port Bill; who had commanded the 
State Forces of Virginia from 1777; who had pledged his 
personal credit to raise a loan in 1780; and had advanced 
money from his own pocket to pay two Virginia regiments 
sent to the south for the support of General Greene; who now, 
as the Allied Armies approached Yorktown, had been active 
and untiring, beyond all other men, in preparing supplies of 
every sort to support and sustain them; and who pointed the 
first gun at his own dwelling-house in the town, supposing it 
to be occupied by Corn wall is or some of his officers, and 
offered a reward of five guineas for every shell which should 
be fired into it. Still another gallant Virginian was present 
at the siege, — no other than Henry Lee, — " Light Horse 
Harry," as he is called, — who describes the scene as an eye- 
witness in his "Memoirs of the War;" but he, with his legion, 
was attached to General Greene's army, further south, and 
here, perhaps, only accidentally and as a spectator. Thomas 
Nelson, I repeat, was peculiarly and pre-eminently the 
representative of local Virignia on the day we commemorate; 
and his name must ever have a proud and leading place among 
the most precious memories which cluster around his native 
Yorktown. 

I said of local Virginia, — for there was another representa- 
tive of the Old Dominion here, greater than Nelson, greater 
than any one who could be named, present or absent, living 
or dead. I do not forget that, while America gave WASHING- 
TON to the world, Virginia gave him to America, and that it 



014 OUH NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

is her unshared privilege to recognize and claim, as her son, 
him whom the whole Country acknowledges and reveres as its 
Father ! 

Behold him here at the head of the American Line, presid- 
ing, with modest but majestic dignity, over this whole splendid 
scene of the Surrender! lie is now in his fiftieth year, and 
has gone through anxieties and trials enough of late to have 
filled out the full measure of three-score and ten. That win- 
ter at Valley Forge, those cabals of Conway, that mutiny in 
Pennsylvania and New Jersey, the defection of Charles Lee, 
the treason of Benedict Arnold, — with all the distressing re- 
sponsibilities in which it involved him, — the insufficiency of 
his supplies of men, money, food, and clothing, must have left 
deep traces on his countenance as well as in his heart. But 
he is the same incomparable man as when, at only twenty- 
one, he was sent as a Commissioner from Governor Dinwiddie 
to demand of the French forces their authority for invading 
the King's dominions, or as when, at twenty-three, he was 
the only mounted officer who escaped the French bullets at 
Braddock's defeat. And here he stands foremost, among 
their Dukes and Marquises and Counts and Barons, receiving 
the surrender of the standards under which he had then fought 
against France, as a British colonial officer! 

From the siege of Boston, where he obtained his first 
triumph, to this crowning siege of Yorktown, — more than 
six long years, — he has been one and the same; bearing beyond 
all others, the burden and heat of our struggle for independ- 
ence; advising, directing, commanding; enduring deprivations 
and even injustices without a murmur, and witnessing the 
successes of others without jealousy, — while no such signal 
victory had yet been vouchsafed to his own immediate forces 
as could have satisfied a heart ambitious only for himself. 
But his ambition was only for his Country, and he stands here 
at last, with representatives of all the States around him, and 
with representatives of almost all the great Nations of the 
world as witnesses, to receive, on the soil of his own native 
and beloved Virginia, the surpassing reward of his fortitude 
and patriotism. He has many great functions still to fulfil 



OUATION KOUKKT C. \\ IMIIIiOl'. *)15 

—in presiding over the Convention to frame the Constitution, 
and in giving practical interpretation and con-! ruction to that 
Constitution by eight yearsof the first Presidency. But, with 
this event, the first glorious chapter of his career is closed, 
and he will soon lie found at Annapolis in the sublime alti- 
tude of voluntarily resigning to Congress the plenary com- 
mission he had received from them, and retiring to private 
life. 

Virginians! yon hold his dust as the most precious possession 
of your soil, and would not let it go even to the massive 
mausoleum prepared for it beneath the Capitol at Washing- 
ton, which no other dust can ever fill. Oh, let his memory, 
his principles, his example, be ever as sacredly and jealously 
guarded in your hearts! No second Washington will ever be 
yours, or ever be ours. Of no one but him could it have been 
justly said: — 

All discord ceases at bis name, — 
All ranks contend to swell their fame. 

The highest and most coveted title which any man can 
reach, — not in our own land only, or in our own age only, 
but all lands and in all ages, — will still and ever be — that 
" he approached nearest to Washington ;" and in every exigency 
which may arise, the test questions of patriotism will be,— 
"What would Washington have said?" " What would Wash- 
ington have done?" The eloquent Lamartine exclaimed, as 
he so fearlessly confronted the Red Flag of Communism, 
thirty-three years ago, in Paris: "The want of France is a 
Washington." Our own country knows how to sympathize 
with such a want. " While the Coliseum stands Rome shall 
stand," was the familiar proverb of antiquity. We associate 
the durability of our free institutions with no material struct- 
ure. Columns and obelisks, statues and monuments, conse- 
crated halls and stately capitols, may crumble and disappear; 
the little St. John's Church in Virginia, where Patrick Henry 
exclaimed, "Give me Liberty or give me Death," the old State 
House in Boston, where James Otis "breathed into this nation 
the breath of life," — the Old South, Faneuil Hall, Carpenter's 



1)1 C) OUR NATIONAL JUBlLEfi. 

Hull and the Hull of Independence at Philadelphia, one after 
another, may be sacrificed to the improvement of a thorough- 
fare, or fall before the inexorable elements; — but when the 
character and example of Washington shall have lost their 
hold upon the hearts of the people, when his precepts shall be 
discarded and his principles disowned and rejected, we may 
then begin to fear, if not to despair, for the perpetuity of our 
Union and of our Freedom. We were all Virginians once, 
when the Pilgrim Fathers signed their little Compact in the 
cabin of the Mayflower, and spoke of Plymouth and Mas- 
sachusetts as "these northern parts of Virginia." We will all 
be Virginians again, in revering the Father of his Country, 
in recognizing him as worthy to be first forever in all Ameri- 
can hearts, and in thanking God, that, after so many delays and 
discouragements and trials, he was privileged to find on his 
native soil, a hundred years ago to-day, the scene of his most 
memorable triumph. 

And here, close at the side of Washington, behold the only 
other figure which remains to be specially designated on the 
field I have attempted to depict! He stands proudly in the 
American line, in which he had so long and gallantly served; 
but he stands as a representative of more than one land, as a 
living link between two — The beloved Lafayette! He must 
have felt at that moment, — he certainly had a right to feel — 
that his fondest day-dream had been verified, his most ardent 
anticipations fulfilled. To the immediate consummation which 
he was now witnessing, his own compatriots had contributed 
the indispensable element of success, and for their co-operation 
he had lent the whole strength of his influence and his en- 
treaties, and had led the way, at every cost and sacrifice, by 
his personal example. He had foreseen the result many months 
before, and thanked Washington in one of his letters, "for 
the most beautiful prospect which I may ever behold." A long 
and eventful career is still before him; for he is but twenty- 
four years old, — his twenty-fourth birthday having occurred 
during the progress of the siege. He hastens home to give 
the name of Virginia to the daughter born after his return. 
He is destined to command armies on his native soil. He is 



ORATION — ROBERT C. WINTHROP. 917 

destined to be the subject of cruel imprisonment, and excite 
the sympathies of the civilized world. He is to be the arbiter 
of dynasties, and lead up "a citizen king" to the throne of 
France. He is to revisit in triumph the land lie has aided, to 
be received with more than regal honors, and to return home 
to die at last with the respect and affection of all good men. 
But nowhere will he stand more proudly than here, on this Held 
of Yorktown, by the side of his revered Washington, exult- 
ing in the legitimate fruits of his own untiring efforts. To no 
scene of his life did he recur with more enthusiasm; to no 
place did he come, during his last visit to our country, with 
more eagerness and even ecstasy. I have seen his own private 
letter to his friend, President Monroe, written at Yorktown 
on the 20th of October, 1824, when, in company with the 
Governor of Virginia, and Chief Justice Marshal, and Colonel 
linger of South Carolina, — one of the two only surviving field 
officers of his American Light Infantry, — he had spent the 
forty-third Anniversary of the Surrender on this spot, and 
had been the subject of that brilliant ceremonial reception. 
It was from the lips of James Madison, not many years 
afterwards, and but a few years before his death, under his 
own roof at Montpelier, that I learned to think and speak of 
Lafayette, not merely as an ardent lover of liberty, a bosom 
friend of Washington, and a brave and disinterested volunteer 
for American Independence, — leading the way, as a pioneer, 
for France to follow, — but as a man of eminent practical ability, 
and as great, in all true senses of that term, as he was chivalrous 
and generous and good. Honor to his memory this day from 
every American heart and tongue, and a cordial welcome to 
M. Bureaux de Pusy, M. de Corcelle, and to all others of his 
relatives who have accepted the invitation of our Government, 
and whose presence on this occasion is hailed with such peculiar 
satisfaction and delight! 

Said I not justly, Fellow-Citizens, at the outset of 
this Address, that our earliest and our latest acknowledge- 
ments to-day are due to France, for the joyous con- 
summation which we are assembled to commemorate? 
Said I not justly, that — whatever confidence we may feel 



018 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

now, or whatever assurance there was then, that the 
ultimate result of the American struggle, whether aided 
or unaided, could have heen nothing less than Inde- 
pendence — our immediate success in the arduous conflict was 
owing, under God, to the assistance of that generous and gallant 
nation? Never, never, can the fact be forgotten in the history 
of American liberty, nor ever can the obligations which were 
thus incurred be lost from our most grateful recollections. 
Nor do I think that France herself lias a page in all her annals 
which she would be less willing to obliterate, — least of all in 
these recent clays when new ties of sympathy have been created 
between us as the two great sister Republics of the world. 
Certainly, if Lafayette himself could have looked forward from 
this field of Yorktownand foreseen that, when this Centennial 
Anniversary should be celebrated by the American people, his 
own beloved country would be represented here by the relatives 
of Rochambeau, and by his own descendants, — coming over 
as citizens of a French Republic, — he would have felt that all 
his heroic efforts and sacrifices had not been made for the 
liberty of America only. But he did foresee it, as through 
a glass darkly, it is true, for many years, but with a clearer 
and more confident eye before he died. Fven at the moment 
of the Surrender, he wrote, — "Humanity has gained its suit: 
Liberty will never more be without an asylum." But at 
Bunker Hill, in 1825, during his triumphal tour, as the guest 
of the nation, he gave emphatic expression to his faith, as 
well as his hope, when, after toasting " The resistance to op- 
pression which has already enfranchised the American Hemi- 
sphere," he added, "The next half-century's Jubilee Toast 
shall bej to enfranchised Europe!" 

AVe do not forget that it was from a Bourbon Monarch we 
received tins aid. We do not forget of what dynasty the 
vigilant and far-sighted Vergennes, and the accomplished but 
somewhat wavering Necker, were Ministers, — together with 
the aged Maurepas, over whose death-bed the tidings of this 
surrender "threw a halo." AVe do not forget that it was in 
the very uppermost ranks of French society that an enthusiasm 
for our contest for freedom first caught and kindled. We do 



ORATION- ROBERT C. \\T NTH K<>1\ 919 

Hot forget that it was from the highest nobility of France that 
so many of her brave soldiers came over to help us, and went 
home, alas! to reap such a harvest of horrors for themselves. 
We would not breathe a word or thought to-day in disparage- 
ment of those who were the immediate instruments of our 
success on this field. The sad fate of Louis XVI. and Marie 
Antoinette, and of so many of the gay young officers who were 
gathered here around Washington and Rochambeau, a century 
ago, cannot he recalled by Americans without emotion, as they 
reflect that, by the very act of helping us to the establishment 
of republican institutions, they were preparing the way for 
dethronement, exile, or death on the scaffold, for themselves. 
But it is to France that our acknowledgments are due — to 
France, then an Absolute Monarchy, afterwards an Empire, 
then a Constitutional Monarchy, again an Empire, — but 
always France: Toujours la France! She has many 
glories to boast of in her history, glories in art and science, 
glories in literature and philosophy, glories in peace and war, 
brilliant statesmen and orators and authors, heroic soldiers 
and captains and conquerors on laud and on sea; and even in 
the later pages of that history, amid all her recent reverses, 
the endurance and fortitude of her marVelously mercurial 
people — rising superior to what seemed a crushing downfall — 
have won the admiration and sympathy of the world. When 
I witnessed personally, by a happy chance, the removal of 
the last scaffolding from that superb column in the Place Yen- 
dome, restored in all its original beauty as a priceless monument 
of history, I could not but feel that the glories of France were 
safe. When we all witnessed, from afar, the magic prompt- 
ness with which, at the call of her late admirable President, 
Tin Kits, and almost as at the touch of Midas, those millions 
of gold came pouring into the public coffers to provide for the 
immediate payment of her ransom from Germany, we all could 
not fail to feel, that she had a reserved power to reinstate her- 
self, as she has done, among the foremost nations of the world. 
Yet, as her children, and her children's children for a thous- 
and years, and till time shall he no more, shall review her 
varied and most impressive annals, since Gaul was conquered by 



920 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Julias Cassar, down through the days of Clovis and Charle- 
magne, through all her dynasties, — Merovingian, Carlovingian 
and Oapetian, Valois, Bourbon, Bonaparte, or Orleans, — their 
eyes will still rest, and still be riveted with just pride, on the 
brief but eventful story of this L9th of October, 1781. And 
as they read that story her classical scholars will recall the 
account which the great Roman historian, Livv, has left us, of 
the splendid ceremonial at the celebration of the Isthmian 
names, when Titus Quinctius, the Roman Proconsul and 
General, having subdued Philip of Macedon, and given free- 
dom and independence to Greece, from lip to lip the saying- 
ran, and resounded over Corinth, — in words which might 
almost have been written prophetically, as well as historically, 

"That there is a nation in the world, which, at 

its own expense, with its own labor, and at its own- 
risk, waged war for the liberty of others: and 
this not merely for contiguous states, or for near 
neighbors, or for countries that made part of the 
same continent; but that they even crossed the seas 
for the purpose, so that no unlawful power should 
subsist on the face of the whole earth, but that 
justice, right, and law should everywhere have sov- 
EREIGN SWAY."* 

More than twenty centuries divide the two records. Twenty 
centuries more may hardly include their like again. The two 
interventions, take them for all in all, — their incidents, their 
objects, their results, — may, perchance, stand unique forever on 
the respective pages of ancient and modern history. Our own 
Republic, certainly, with the farewell warning of Washington 
in memory against all entangling alliances, and with its jealous 
adherence to Monroe doctrines, is neither in the way of recip- 
rocating such aid, nor of ever invoking it again. Not the 
less gracefully and fervently, however, may we acknowledge 
and celebrate the noble act of France, and offer to her, as we 
do this day, in the name of our whole country, and in the 
name of American Liberty, a renewed assurance of the grati- 

*Tav. Hist. lib. 33, 



ORATION— ROBERT C. WTNTHROP. 921 

tude which is so justly her due, and which nol apse of time can 
ever extinguish in our hearts. Our commemorative Column 
has lingered, indeed, with almost all the other monuments 
and statues ordered by our government in those days of narrow 
resources and inadequate art. All the more significantly and 
imposingly it will now rise,— not in mere fulfilment of the 
resolution of the old Continental Congress, but by the solemn 
decree of fifty millions of living people, with all the accumu- 
lated arrears of gratitude of intervening generations. " Major, 
quo serior, gloria, ubi invidia secessit." It will stand like 
some stately century plant, whose blossoms attract the gaze 
and admiration of observers all the more intently, because they 
have taken a hundred years for their development! 

Welcome, welcome, then, to the Representatives of France, 
— of her President, of her Army and Navy and all her Depart- 
ments, — His Excellency M. Outrey, Colonel Lichtenstein, 
General Boulanger, Captain de Cuverville and the others, 
who have come, at the invitation of our Government, to wit- 
ness some of the results of what Frenchmen did for us, and 
helped us to do for ourselves, so long ago; and may peace and 
good-will be perpetual between the land of Lafayette and the 
land of Washington! 

With the event which we are commemorating, the War of 
the American Revolution was practically closed. A year and a 
half still remained for General Greene to display his vigilance 
and valor at the South, and for General Heath and others to 
control and administer our posts at the North, while our Com- 
missioners in Paris were exhausting all the arts of diplomacy 
in arranging the formal Treaty of Independence and Peace 
with Great Britain. Not until the 18th of April, 1783, was 
Washington able to issue his memorable Order for the Ces- 
sation of Hostilities, — a day which, as he said in that order, 
—referring to the first blood at Lexington and Concord, — ■ 
"completes the eighth year of the war." But the real con- 
summation had been accomplished on this field. The first 
blow for independence dates from Massachusetts. The 
Declaration of Independence dates from Philadelphia. But 



922 OL'K NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

the crowning and clinching victory is forever associated with 
Virginia, and throws unfading lustre upon these surrounding- 
shores and plains. And thus, by a striking coincidence, the 
final, triumphal scene of our great revolutionary drama was 
reserved for the very same shores and surroundings on which 
the earliest American colonization was attempted, and at last 
successfully accomplished, under the inspiration of Sir Walter 
Raleigh, a century and a half before. Jamestown and York- 
town! llow much of the most impressive history of our 
country is condensed in the names of those two neighboring 
Virginia localities, — at this day, indeed, but little more than 
names, but always to have a place in the same fond remem- 
brance with Plymouth Eock and Bunker Hill! 

And now, Fellow-Countrymen, as we look back at that 
history at this hour, and see at what a great price our fathers 
purchased for us the freedom we are so richly enjoying, — at 
what a cost of toil and treasure and blood these Republican 
institutions of ours have been founded and built up, — can 
there fail to come home to each one of our hearts a deeper 
sense of our responsibility, as a people and as individuals, 
for upholding, advancing, and transmitting them unimpaired 
to our posterity? The century which has rolled away since 
the scene Ave commemorate needs no review on this occasion. 
It has made its mark upon our land, and written its own 
history on all our memories. The immense increase of our 
population, the vast expansion of our territory, the countless 
productions of our industry, the measureless mass of our crops, 
the magical reduction of our debt, the marvelous prosperity 
of our people, beyond that of all other nations of the earth, — 
all these are things not to boast of, as if they were of our own 
accomplishment, but to recognize and thank God for with all 
our hearts. Nor can we of this generation stand here to-day, 
on this Virginia soil, beneath this October sun, without an 
irrepressible thrill of exultation and thanksgiving, that we 
are here as brothers, from the St. John's to the Rio Grande, 
from the Atlantic to the Pacific, — all conflicts long over, and 
all causes for conflicts at an end, — fifty millions of people, all 



ORATION— ROBERT C. VVINTHROP. 923 

free and equal, and all recognizing one Country, one Consti- 
tution, one Flag, to be cherished in every heart, to be defended 

by every hand ! 

But it is of one future, not of the pastor even of the present, 
that I would speak, in the brief remnant of this Address. It 
is not what we have been, or what we have done, or even what, 
we are, that weighs on our thoughts at this hour, even to the 
point of oppressiveness; but what, what are we to be? What 
is to be the character of a second century of Independence for 
America? What are to be its issues for ourselves? What are 
to be its influences on mankind at large? And what can we 
do, all powerless as we are to pierce the clouds which rest 
upon the future, or fo penetrate the counsels of an over- 
ruling Providence,— what can we do to secure these glorious 
institutions oi ours from decline and fall that other genera- 
tions may enjoy what we now enjoy, and that our liberty may 
indeed be "a liberty to that only which is good, just, and 
honest," — a "Liberty enlightening the World?" 

We cannot, if we would, conceal from others or from our- 
selves, that all has not gone well with us of late, and that 
there lias been, and still is, in many minds, an anxious, if not 
a fearful, looking forward to what is to come. I do not for- 
get that other lands have not been exempt from simultaneous 
and even similar troubles with our own, and that a contagion 
of crime and tumult seems to have been sweeping over both 
hemispheres alike. We need not, certainly, make too much 
of our own discreditable deadlocks at Washington or at Albany, 
while the Prime .Minister of England is heard lamenting that 
"the greatest and noblest of all representative assemblies in 
the world is in some degree disabled, in some degree dishonored, 
by the abuse of rules intended for the defense of liberty." 

But these have not been the worst signs of our times. It 
was strikingly said, by a great moral and religious writer of 
old England in the last century, in relation to his own land, 
that " between the period of national honor and complete 
degeneracy there is usually an interval of national vanity, 
during which examples of virtue are recounted and admired 
without being imitated." Oh, let us beware lest we should be 



924 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

approaching such an interval in our own history! No one will 
deny that there is enough of recounting and extolling thegreat 
examples of virtue and valor and patriotism which have heen 
left us hy our fathers. Voices of admiration and eulogy resound 
throughout the laud. Statues and monuments and obelisks are 
rising at every corner. There can hardly he too many of them. 
But vice and crime, peculation and embezzlement, bribery, cor- 
ruption, profligacy, and even assassination, alas! stalk our 
streets and stare up at such memorials unrebuked and una- 
bashed. And are there not symptons of malarias, in some of 
our high places, more pestilent than any that ever emanated 
from Potomac or even Pontine marshes, infecting our whole 
civil service, and tainting the very life-blood of the nation? 

Let me not exaggerate our dangers, or dash the full joy of 
this occasion, by suggesting too strongly that there may be 
poison in our cup. But I must be pardoned, as one of a past 
generation, for dealing with old-fashioned counsels in old- 
fashioned phrases. Profound dissertations on the nature of 
government, metaphysical speculations on the true theory of 
civil liberty, scientific dissections of the machinery of our 
own political system, — even were I capable of them, — would be 
as inappropriate as they would be worthless. Our reliance for 
the preservation of Republican liberty can only be on the com- 
monplace principles, and common-sense maxims, which lie 
within the comprehension of the children in our schools, or of 
the simplest and least cultured man or woman who wields a 
hammer or who plies a needle. 

The fear of the Lord must still and ever be the beginning 
of oui wisdom, and obedience to His commandments the rule 
of our lives. Crime must not go unpunished, and vice must 
be stigmatized and rebuked as vice. Human life must be 
held sacred, and lawless violence and bloodshed cease to be 
regarded as a redress or remedy for anything. It is not by 
assassinating Emperors or Presidents that the welfare of man- 
kind or the liberty of the people is to be promoted. Such 
acts ought to be as execrable in the sight of man as they are 
in the sight of God. The only one-man power this country 
has had to tremble at, is the power of some wretched mis- 



ORATION-- i:<ii:nrt C. \vj .Vi li uoi>. &26" 

c'reant, seeking spoils but finding none, will) a pistol in his 
hand, to neutralize and nullify the votes of millions, and put 
a beloved President to torture and to death. The rights of 
the humblest, as well as of the highest, must be respected 
and enforced. Labor, in all its departments, must be justly 
remunerated and elevated, and the true dignity of labor 
recognized. The poor must be wisely visited and liberally 
cared for, so that mendicity shall not be tempted into men- 
dacity, nor want exasperated into crime. The great duties 
of individual citizenship must be conscientiously discharged. 
Peace, order, and the good old virtues of honesty, charity, 
temperance, and industry, must be cultivated and reverenced. 
The purity of private life must be cherished and guarded, 
and luxury and extravagance discouraged. Polygamy must 
cease to pollute our land. Profligate literature must be scorned 
and left unpurchased. Public opinion must be refined, 
purified, strengthened, and rendered prevailing and imperative, 
by the best thoughts and best words which the, press, the 
platform, and the pulpit can pour forth. The pen and the 
tongue alike must be exercised under a sense of moral respon- 
sibility. In a word the less of government we have by formal 
laws and statutes, the more we need, and the more we must 
have, of individual self-government. 

For, my friends, there must be government of some sort, 
and it must be exercised and enforced. Cities and towns must 
make provision for all that relates to cities and towns. States, 
which still and always have duties, which still and always 
have rights, must provide for all that justly relates to States. 
And the general government of the Union must exercise its 
paramount authority over everything of domestic or foreign 
interest which comes within the sphere of its constitutional 
control. Civil service must be reformed. Elections and ap- 
pointments, as Burke said, must be made "as to a sacred 
function and not as to a pitiful job." The elective franchise 
must be everywhere protected. Public credit must be main- 
tained in city, state, and nation, at every sacrifice. Neither 
a gold nor a silver currency, nor both conjoined, — neither 
mono-metallisms nor bi-met all isms, — can form any substitute 



026 OUR NATIONAL .11 IllLI'l.. 

for the honesty and good faith which arc the basis of an 
enduring public credit. Our independent judicial system, 
with all the rights and duties of the jury-box, must be respected 
and upheld. The army and the navy must be adequately 
maintained for the defense of our coasts and commerce and 
boundaries, and the militia not neglected for domestic exi- 
gencies; but Peace, at home and abroad, must still and ever be 
the aim and end of all our preparations for war. Above all, 
the Union, — the Union "in any event," as Washington said, 
must be preserved! 

But let me add at once that, with a view to all these ends, 
and as the indispensable means of promoting and securing 
them all, Universal Education, without distinction of race, 
must be encouraged, aided, and enforced. The elective 
franchise can never be taken away from any of those to whom 
it has once been granted, but we can and must make education 
co-extensive with the elective franchise; and it must be done 
without delay, as a measure of self-defense, and with the 
general co-operation of the authorities and of the people of 
the whole country. One half of our country, during the last 
ten or fifteen years, has been opened for the first time to the 
introduction and establishment of free common schools, and 
there is not wealth enough at present in that region to provide 
for this great necessity. "Two millions of children without 
the means of instruction," was the estimate of the late Dr. 
Sears, in 1879. Every year brings another installment of 
brutal ignorance to the polls, to be the subject of cajolement, 
deception, corruption, or intimidation. Here, here is our 
greatest danger for the future. The words of our late 
lamented President, in his Inaugural, come to us to-day 
with redoubled emphasis from that unclosed grave on the 
Lake: "All the constitutional power of the Nation and of 
the States, and all the volunteer forces of the People, should 
be sumomned to meet this danger by the saving influence of 
universal education." No drought or flood or conflagration, 
no succession of droughts or floods or conflagrations, can be so 
disastrous to our material wealth, as this periodical influx, 
these annual inundations, of ignorance, to our moral and 



ORATIOK— KOliRRT C. WlNTIJkoi'. ^ 

political welfare. Every year, every day, of delay, increases 

the difficulty of meeting the danger. Slavery is but half 
abolished, emancipation is but half completed, while millions 
of freemen with votes in their hands are left without 
education. Justice to them, the welfare of the States in 
which they live, the safety of the whole Republic, the dignity 
of the Elective Franchise, alike demand that the still remain- 
ing bonds of ignorance shall be unloosed and broken, and the 
minds as well as the bodies of the emancipated go free! 

I know whereof I speak; and have certainly given time 
enough, and thought enough, to the subject, for fourteen 
years past, in my relations to a great Southern Trust, to 
learn, at least, what that Trust has done, what it can do, and 
what it cannot do. It has been thus far, as a voice crying in 
the wilderness, — calling on the people of the South to under- 
take the great work for themselves, and preparing the way 
for its successful prosecution. It may be looked back upon, 
one of these days, if not now, as the little leaven winch has 
leavened the whole lump. But the whole lump must be 
kneaded and moulded and worked over, with unceasing 
activity and energy, by every town, village, and district, for 
itself, or there will be no sufficient bread for the hungry 
and famished masses. And there must be aids and appro- 
priations and endowments, by Cities and States, and by the 
Nation at large, through its public lands, if in no other way, 
and to an amount, compared with which the gift of George 
Peabody — munificent as it was for an individual benefactor — 
is but as the small dust of the balance. 

It is itself one of the great rights of a free people, to lie 
educated and trained up from childhood to that ability to 
govern themselves, which is the largest element in republican 
self-government, and without which all self-government must 
be a failure and a farce, here and everywhere ! It is indeed pri- 
marily a right of our children, and they are not able to enforce 
and vindicate it for themselves. But let us beware of sub- 
jecting ourselves to the ineffable reproach of robbing the 
children of their bread, and casting it before dogs, by wasting 
untold millions on corrupt or extravagant projects, andstarv- 



{)%$ OUR NATIONAL JCiULEE. 

ing our common schools. The whole field of the Union is 
now open to education, and theAvhole field of the Union must 
be occupied. Free Governments must stand or fall with Free 
Schools. These and these alone can supply the firm foun- 
dation; and that foundation must, at this very moment, be 
extended and strengthened and rendered immovable and 
indestructible, like that of the gigantic obelisk at Washing- 
ton, if the boasted fabric of liberty, for which this victory 
cleared the ground, is not to settle and totter and crumble! 

Tell me not that I am indulging in truisms. I know they 
are truisms; but they are better — a thousand-fold better— 
than Nihilisms or Communisms or Fenianisms, or any of the 
other isms which are making such headway in supplanting 
them. No advanced thought, no mystical philosophy, no 
glittering abstractions, no swelling phrases about freedom, — 
not even science, with all its marvelous inventions and 
discoveries, — can help us much in sustaining this Republic. 
Still less can any Godless theories of Creation, or any infidel 
attempts to rule out the Redeemer from His rightful su- 
premacy in our hearts, afford us any hope of security. That 
way lies despair! Commonplace truths, old familiar teach- 
ings, the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, 
the Farewell Address of Washington, honesty, virtue, patriot- 
ism, universal education, are what the world most needs in 
these days, and our own part of the world as much as any 
other part. Without these we are lost. With these, and 
with the blessing of God, which is sure to follow them, a 
second century of our Republic may be confidently looked for- 
ward to; and those who shall gather on this field, a hundred 
years hence, shall then exult, as we are now exulting, in the 
continued enjoyment of the free institutions bequeathed to 
us by our fathers, and in honoring the memories of those who 
have sustained them ! 

It is matter of record, Fellow-Citizens, that on the day 
after the Surrender here had taken place, Washington issued 
his General Order congratulating the Army on the glorious 
event. That Order concluded as follows : " Divine service is to 
be performed to-morrow in the several brigades and divisions. 



ORATIOH— ROBERT C. WINTHROP. 929 

The Commander-in-Chief recommends that the troops not on 
duty should universally attend, with the seriousness of deport- 
ment and gratitude of heart which the recognition of such 
reiterated and astonishing interpositions of Providence demand 
of us." Accordingly, on Sunday, the 21st of October, the 
various divisions were drawn up in the field to offer "to the 
Lord of Hosts, the God of Patties," says the journalist 
Thacher, "their grateful homage for the preservation of our 
lives through the dangers of the siege, and for the import ant 
event with which Divine Providence has seen fit to crown our 
efforts." 

The joyful tidings reached Philadelphia by the hand of 
Colonel Tilghman, at midnight of the 23d, and the next morn- 
ing were formally communicated to Congress, when resolutions 
were passed, on motion of Mr. Randolph of Virginia, of which 
the very first was as follows: "Resolved, That Congress will 
at two o'clock this day go in procession to the Dutch Lutheran 
Church and return thanks to Almighty God for crowning the 
Allied Arms of the United States and France with success, by 
the surrender of the whole British Army under the command 
of the Earl of Cornwallis." 

Two days only intervened when, on the 2Gth, a Solemn 
Proclamation was issued by Congress, acknowledging "the 
influence of Divine Providence in raising up for us a powerful 
Ally;" and praying God "to protect and prosper that 
illustrious Ally, and to favor our united exertions for the 
speedy establishment of a safe, honorable, and lasting peace." 

In France the tidings were received with a similar recog- 
nition of the Divine aid; and orders were sent out at once by 
the King for a solemn Te Deum of thanksgiving by Ins 
troops in America. The King himself wrote a special letter 
to Rochambeau, signed by his own hand, and dated at Ver- 
sailles, 26th of November, 1781, concluding with these 
impressive words: "In calling these events to the mind, and 
acknowledging how much the abilitiesof General Washington, 
your talents, those of the general officers employed under the 
orders of you both, and the valor of the troops, have rendered 
this campaign glorious, my chief design is to inspire the hearts. 



930 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

of nil as well as mine with the deepest gratitude towards the 
Author of all prosperity; and in the intention of addressing 
my supplication to Him for the continuation of his divine 
protection, I have written to the Archbishops and Bishops of 
my Kingdom to cause Te Deum to be sung in the churches 
of their dioceses; and I address this letter to inform you, that 
I desire it may be likewise sung in the town or camp where 
you may be with the corps of troops, the command of which 
has been instrusted to you, and that you would give orders 
that the ceremony be performed with all the public rejoicings 
used in similar cases, in which I beg of God to keep you in His 
holy protection." 

All France, as well as all America, was thus ringing and 
resounding with the praise of God for our great deliverance. 

" Not unto us, not unto us," was the emotion and the utter- 
ance of the whole American people, and of all who sympa- 
thized with the American people at that day; and "Not unto 
us, not unto us, but unto Thy name be the praise," must 
still be the emotion and the utterance of us all, as we con- 
template the completed century of Republican liberty which 
that day ushered in. Commemorative columns and splendid 
ceremonials are fit tributes of gratitude to the mortal or 
immortal men of our own land and of other lands who were 
the' instruments of achieving our independence. But "Glory 
to God in the Highest" must swell up from every true heart 
and lip this hour for what Washington well called "the reit- 
erated and astonishing interpositions " whieh not only carried 
us through the Revolution triumphantly, but which, during 
the century which has succeeded it, have overruled so wonder- 
fully, to our permanent welfare, events which to human eyes 
seemed fatal to our prosperity and peace! The great French 
historian and statesman, Guizot, has reminded us, in that 
popular history of his own land to which he devoted the last 
labors of his life, that in 177G, before the Declaration of 
Independence, "the Virginians had adopted, at the close of 
their proclamations, the proudly significant phrase, 'God save 
the Liberties of America!' ' Let that Virginia phrase be the 
fervent phrase of us all in all time to come; and let the legend 



ORATION — ROBERT c. WINTHROP. 931 

we have stamped upon our coin, and inserted in the very 
eagle's beak, be indelibly impressed on every patriotic heart,— 
"In God we trust." 

Fellow-Citizens of the United States,— Citizens of the old 
Thirteen of the Revolution, and Citizens of the new Twenty- 
five, whose stars are now glittering with no inferior lustre in 
our glorious galaxy,— yes, and Citizens of the still other States 
which I dare not attempt to number, but which are destined 
at no distant period to be evolved from our imperial Texas 
and Territories, — I hail you all as brothers to-day, and call 
upon you all, as you advance in successive generations, to 
stand fast in the faith of the Fathers, and to uphold and 
maintain unimpaired the matchless institutions which are now 
ours! "You are the advanced guard of the human race; you 
have the future of the world," said Madame de Staid to a 
distinguished American, recalling with pride what France 
had done for us at Yorktown. Let us lift ourselves to a fall 
sense of such a repsonsibility for the progress of Freedom, in 
other lands as well as in our own. It is not onrs to intervene 
for the redress of grievances, or for the establishment of 
Independence, elsewhere, as France did here, with fleets and 
armies. But we can, and must, intervene — and we are inter- 
vening, daily and hourly, for better or worse — by the influence 
and the force of our example. Next, certainly, to promoting 
the greatest good of the greatest number at home, the supreme 
mission of our Country is to hold up before the eyes of all 
mankind a practical, well-regulated successful system of Free, 
Constitutional Government, purely administered and loyally 
supported,- — giving assurance, and furnishing proof, that true 
Liberty is not incompatible with the maintenance of Order, 
with obedience to Law, and with a lofty standard of political 
and social Virtue. Every failure here, every degree of failure 
here, through insubordination or discord, through demoraliza- 
tion, corruption, or crime, throws back the cause of freedom 
everywhere, and presents our country as a, warning, instead 
of as an encouragement, to the liberal tendencies of other 
governments and other lands. We cannot escape from the 



932 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

responsibility of this great Intervention of American Example; 
and it involves nothing less than the hope, or the despair, of 
the Ages! Let us strive, then, to aid and advance the Liberty 
of the world, in the only legitimate way in our power, by 
patriotic fidelity and devotion in upholding, illustrating, and 
adorning our own Free Institutions. "Spartam nactuses: 
Hanc exorna!" There is no limit to our prosperity and wel- 
fare, if we are true to those institutions. We have nothing 
now to fear except from ourselves. There is no boundary 
line for separating us, without cordons of custom-houses, and 
garrisons of standing armies, which would change the whole 
character of those institutions. We are One by the con- 
figuration of nature and by the strong impress of art, — inex- 
tricably intertwined by the lay of our land, the run of our 
rivers, the chain of our lakes, and the iron network of our 
crossing and recrossing and ever multiplying and still advanc- 
ing tracks of trade and travel. We are One by the memories 
of our fathers. We are One by the hopes of our children. 
We are One by a Constitution and a Union which have not 
only survived the shock of Foreign and of Civil War, but 
have stood the abeyance of almost all administration, while 
the whole people were waiting breathless, in alternate hope 
and fear, for the issues of an execrable crime. We are One — ■ 
bound together afresh — by the electric chords of sympathy and 
sorrow, vibrating and thrilling, day by day of the livelong 
summer, through every one of our hearts, for our basely 
wounded and bravely suffering President, — bringing us all 
down on our knees together in common supplications for his 
life, and involving us all at last in a common flood of grief at 
his death ! I cannot forget that as I left President Garfield, 
after a friendly visit at the Executive Mansion last May, his 
parting words to me were, " Yes, I shall be with you at York- 
town." We all miss him and mourn him here to-day; and 
not only the rulers and people of all nations have united with 
us in paying homage to his memory, but Nature herself, I 
had almost said, has seemed to sympathize in our sorrow, — 
giving us ashes for beauty, and parched and leaden leaves on 
all our forests, instead of their wonted autumn glories of 



ORATION" — ROBERT C. WTOTHROP. 933 

crimson and gold! But I dare not linger, amid festive scenes 
like these, on that great affliction, which has added, indeed, 
"another hallowed name to the historical inheritance of our 
Republic, " but which has thrown a pall of deepest tragedy 
upon the falling curtain of our first century. Oh, let not its 
influences be lost upon us for the century to come, but let this 
very field, consecrated heretofore by a great surrender of 
foreign foes, be hereafter associated, also, with the nobler 
surrender to each other of all our old sectional animosities and 
prejudices, and let us be Oue, henceforth and always, in 
mutual regard, conciliation, and affection! 

"Goon, hand in hand, States, never to be disunited. 
Be the praise and the heroic song of all posterity! Join 
your invincible might to do worthy and godlike deeds! And 
then — " But I will not add, as John Milton added, in closing 
his inimitable appeal on Reformation in England, two 
centuries and a half ago — "A cleaving curse be his inheritance 
to all generations who seeks to break your Union!" No im- 
precations or anathemas shall escape my lips on this auspicious 
day. Let me rather invoke, as I devoutly and fervently do, 
the choicest and richest blessings of Heaven on those who 
shall do most, in all time to come, to preserve our beloved 
Country in unity, peace and coxcord! 



THE MEANING OF THE MULTITUDE.* 
BY W. E. HUNTINGTON, D.D., 

GRACE EPISCOPAL CHURCH, NEW YORK. 

"It is recorded in Luke's Gospel that a blind man on hear- 
ing the multitude pass by, asked what it meant." 

The question was a reasonable one. Every multitude has 
its meaning, and every multitude a meaning of its own. Men 
do not get together in great numbers without cause. They 
take pleasure in congregating, but there must be a motive to 
congregation. Blind Bartimasus, son of Timaeus, sat by the 
wayside begging. Bereft of one of his senses, he was doubt- 
less all the more keen in the exercise of the others. Ordinarily 
he had no need to ask questions. The meaning of a single 
footstep he probably was quick to understand, for he had 
schooled himself to interpret that particular sound and could 
tell, with tolerable accuracy, whether in any given instance 
the pace betokened an addition to his gains or not. But the 
noise of many hurrying feet baffled him. He knew not 
whether to be gladdened or alarmed. Therefore, hearing the 
multitude pass by, he asked what it meant. 

Within the last few days we have ourselves often had 
occasion to make the same inquiry, What means the multitude? 
Take the question in its largest sense as applying to multitudes 
in general, what is the secret of the strange power they 
exercise over the heart and the imagination? Why does the 
great king, as he looks down upon the million of men he has 
assembled at the Hellespont, betray so much emotion? Why 
does Wordsworth, standing on Westminister Bridge, find him- 
self so deeply touched by the spectacle of London? Nay, to 
go up higher, why does the Son of Man, as He rounds the 
jutting rock that overhangs an angle in the road from Bethany, 
weep, when of a sudden He beholds the city? It is not easy 
to say. We all remember the explanation given in one of 
these instances. The Persian declared that what moved him 

* A post-Centennial sermon delivered May 5th, 1889. 



SERMON — W. li. HUNTINGTON. 935 

was the thought that in a hundred years not one of his ap- 
parently innumerable company would be alive. But a true 
feeling is very often falsely explained by the man who is under 
the stress of it, and it is easier to find the cause of the king's 
tears in the superabundance of the life he saw than in the 
manifoldness of the death he foresaw. 

Whether we can understand the thing or not, certain is it 
that a singular pathos attaches to the spectacle of collective 
life. The sight touches what is most human in us. Their 
voice is as the voice of many waters, and wakens just such 
echoes as the waves stir in us when we hear them break. We 
are forced, in looking on the multitude, to think of the large 
interests of human kind, and just in proportion as the one 
man dwindles into insignificance in the comparison, so does 
the greatness of the whole family come out into clear light. 
'•'All souls," "All saints" — these arc spells to conjure with 
for the very reason that they take us out of ourselves and 
unite us to the illimitable host of those who have lived, who 
are living, and who are to live. How great is God, to whom 
belong the earth and all that therein is, " the compass of the 
world and they that dwell therein." 

But to come back to the multitudes in which we have our- 
selves been interested. What was their significance? What 
did they mean? Well, for one thing, they meant the recog- 
nition of a great common interest. During the larger part of 
their waking hours the inhabitants of a large city are usually 
engrossed in looking severally after their own personal inter- 
ests. They are engaged in " earning their livings," or " making 
their fortunes," as we say. So sharp is the competition in 
this range of effort that we are continually tempted to infer 
from what we see going on around us that selfishness is the 
one all-pervading, all-comprehensive law for man. These 
fellow-creatures, we say to ourselves, have no eyes for any- 
thing but the chance of getting an advantage the one of 
another. 

But when, on rare occasions, a whole city is moved, when 
some great public peril, or calamity, or good fortune calls the 
people, as by one impulse, out into the streets, then we have 



D3G OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

unmistakable signs that behind the eagerness of acquisition 
ami the tenacity of possession there lies the still deeper and 
stronger instinct that prompts to fellowship. The lesser 
truth that we are rivals one of another becomes, at such 
moments, merged in the larger truth that we are members one 
of another; and from the low level of competition we are 
lifted to the higher level of communion. The lesson is an 
especially salutary one for a community so wonderfully 
diversified as ours. Men and woman of English, German, 
Irish, Latin, Scandinavin and Sclavonic stock, here we all 
are crowded together upon an inconsiderable island trying to 
live and to let live. Thus circumstanced we ought to be 
supremely thankful for anything that teaches us how im- 
measurably more important is what we have in common than 
any of those things wherein we differ. "For one is your 
Father, even God, and all ye are brethren." 

Another religious thought — for it is with the religious 
aspect of passing events, and with that only, that the preacher 
is concerned — another religious thought connected with what 
we have been witnessing is this, namely, the interdependence 
that must always exist between discipline and freedom. The 
multitude was divided into two portions — those who were 
marshalled in moving ranks, subject every moment to the 
'word of command, and those who lined the streets and 
squares, merely as spectators; and each half was necessary to 
the enjoyment of the other. The people who looked on 
would have had no pleasure in gazing at a promiscuous and 
undisciplined throng; the men in motion would have reaped 
little satisfaction from their march had there been nobody 
to stand by and admire. And thus each helped the other, for 
from first to last the giving and receiving were mutual. 

I draw from this what I believe to be the just and the im- 
portant inference that for the perfection of social life we need 
a careful balancing of what is disciplinary and strict against 
what is spontaneous and untrammelled. The army principle 
is valuable; we cannot dispense with the element of discipline 
and orderliness. But, on the other hand, so are freedom of 
movement and liberty of choice precious. We can no more 



SERMON — W. R. HUNTINGTON". M7 

spare the one than we can spare the other. We need both of 
them. Society may suffer alike from disorganization and from 
over-organization. The anarchists, if they could have their 
way, would break ranks altogether. The socialists, on the other 
hand, seem minded to put us all into the ranks, and carry 
organization out into the minutest details of life. But that 
which "sober-suited freedom" loves is a social state in which 
certain things are done according to a rigidly ordered system, 
because efficiency demands it, and certain other things are left 
to every man's own choosing. On successive days we saw two 
armies march before us, one of them a military, the other an 
industrial, army; the one a body of men banded together for 
destructive purposes, should destruction of life on a large 
scale become necessary for the safety of the State; the other a 
body of men whose energies are devoted to constructive work. 

But God forbid that by any scheme of conscription the 
Avhole nation should ever be drafted into either the military 
or the industrial army and human life turned into a mechanism 
from which all spontaneity had been expelled. The splendors 
of a military empire, the frequent bugle note, the rich effects 
of color, the clatter of steel as the horsemen ride past, the ring 
of grounded arms upon the pavement, these delights of eye and 
ear are but a paltry compensation for the loss of freedom to 
choose one's own line of movement so that it be a right line, 
and of liberty to say what one will so that it be said in truth 
and in charity. 

There is still another point that ought to be considered in 
our meditation upon the meaning of the multitude. How 
are we to account for the greater interest that in the minds 
of the lookers-on appeared to attach to the martial as con- 
trasted with the civic side of the festival? Why were people 
so much more enthusiastic over soldiers than over artisans? 
Was it because as a nation we rate the arts of war above the 
arts of peace? Did it betoken on our part a love of bloodshed 
for its own sake, a positive preference for the methods of force 
over the methods of quiet adjudication? Not at all, but 
rather this, that there is a fascination for the human heart in 
whatever vividly suggests those higher qualities of manhood 



038 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

that we name courage, endurance, sacrifice and the like. 
"Neither counted I my life dear unto myself" — there spoke 
the soldier in St. Paul, and whenever we catch that strain 
anywhere, we listen. The motive of this or that particular 
soldier may not bear examination. The most showy of 
uniforms may cover the most cowardly of hearts, but what 
the soldier, as such, stands for is the idea of devotedness, 
readiness for self-sacrifice at the call of duty. With the 
armed man rest, in a sense, the issues of life and death. This 
is serious, this means something real, we say. The fact that 
the force is latent, slumbering, only adds to the charm of the 
thing. We dream of possible contingencies. We imagine 
what battle might mean for these men. for their friends, for 
their homes. 

Whether we recognize them and are fully conscious of 
them or not, these are the thoughts that lie in the back- 
ground of the mind and prompt the feeling that sways us at 
such times. It is a mistake to attribute it all to the glitter 
of the outward symbolism of war. There is a subtile spiritual 
influence involved in the matter. The thought of sacrifice 
gives diginity to what we see: these are men prepared, if need 
be, to surfer wounds and death. 

And here we find our point of contact with the special teach- 
ing of this second Sunday after Easter. We have heard, out 
of the Gospel for the day, of that Good Shepherd, who is so 
named because He giveth His life for the sheep. His dealings 
with " the multitude" were many and frequent when He was 
here among us. They pressed upon Him by the sea-shore, 
in wilderness places where they fainted for hunger, in city 
streets, in the courts and porches of the Temple, at the doors 
of synagogues and in the gates of walled towns — everywhere. 
It was the rustle made by the multitude following Him that 
moved Bartimams in our text to cry out and ask what it all 
meant. 

Yes, we who believe belong to Him. He is our Shepherd, 
we His flock. It is wonderful how He can care for so many, 
is it not? but care He does. He knows us all by name. 
No one is ever forgotten for a moment. Sometimes He is 



SERMON — W. R. HUNTINGTON. 939 

lending us, sometimes He is seeking us out in far places 
whither we may have wandered, sometimes Be is feeding us, 
hut always He is caring for us. No multitude can overtax 
His resources, though we are often baffled in our attempts 
to divine where the resources lie. It pleases Him to try our 
faith with hard questions now and then, such questions as 
that He asked of Philip, "Whence shall we buy bread that 
these may eat?" but all the while, He Himself knows what 
He shall do. In the event there is always bread enough 
and to spare. What a different thing it would make of 
life in almost all respects; what a new light would be shed 
over the whole earth if the multitude of men would only 
knowingly and willingly let itself become transformed into 
the Shepherd's flock. That is God's purpose in history. 
Surely but slowly He is bringing the thing to pass. Out of 
many nations and peoples and kindreds and tribes He is 
fashioning the assembly of the saints, the final race, the pre- 
destined commonwealth of souls, the city wherein dwelleth 
righteousness. 

So, then, no longer let us ask in faltering voice, with poor 
blind Bartimaeus, what the multitude means. In Christ's 
revelation of God's eternal purpose the meaning of it is clear. 
However it may be with those who grope, our opened eyes 
cannot refuse to see a truth so unmistakably disclosed. What 
the multitude means is this, that God has a blessing for the 
many as well as for the one; that He does not think of us or 
deal with us wholly and only as single and separate souls, 
though He does so think and deal, but that over and above 
this ministry to individuals He has planned and is executing 
a great life-saving work in which the whole family of man 
has lot and portion. This is that "common salvation" of 
which St. Peter writes. This is that large atonement or at- 
one-ment, that far-reaching reconciliation which is cosmic 
in its scope. This is that generous ingathering of the lost 
which takes account of and makes provision for those other 
sheep " not of this fold," of which the Shepherd speaks so 
tenderly. Them also He must bring, He says, that there 
may be one flock and one Shepherd. 



040 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Do I seem to yon to have been drawing far-fetched con- 
clusions from very simple premises? I hope not. The less 
obvious lessons taught us by the multitude may prove as 
valuable as those that lie upon the surface. What our eyes 
have seen has quickened in all of us the love of country. 
Shall we be the worse for it if, in addition to this, we learn 
to think more gratefully of God, and more generously of the 
great things He is doing for that largest of all multitudes, man- 
kind? A common motive, as we saw when we set out, a com- 
mon motive is what draws a multitude together. What com- 
mon motive can we think of strong enough to bind the whole 
round world save that which prompts the glad ascription, 
"Glory be to Thee, Lord, Most High?" 



COLUMBUS AND HIS FORERUNNERS. 
BY REV. DAVID GREGG D.D. 

PASTOR OF LAFAYETTE AVE. PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, 
BROOKLYN, N. Y. 

We possess nothing more valuable than history. History 
broadens human life by bringing the life of the one man into 
touch with the lives of all men. History makes us familiar 
with the shining footprints of God, who walks eternal among 
the ages. History reveals the issue of moral principles when 
acted out in life and carried to their logical ultimatum. 

History gathers for us the treasures of the past and lays at 
our feet the experiences, and the accumulations, and the 
attainments, and the ideals of those who have lived before us. 
The advantage of living in the nineteenth century is this: we 
possess the riches of all the centuries. Is it not something to 
you that somebody cleared the American forests, exterminated 
the beasts of prey, opened the mines, improved the crops, 
built the cities, erected the schools and the churches and made 
the civilization into which you were born? 

The doing of these things, so far as you are concerned, 
constitutes the difference between riches and poverty, igno- 
rance and education, hardship and luxury, barbarism and civ- 
ilization. There is a difference between 149:2 and L892. The 
difference is tremendous — tremendous here in America — ■ 
tremendous the world over. 

If this be so, why then should we trouble ourselves with, 
the past? It is over and gone. § We have L892 and that is all 
we need. Why burrow in the past and mine in it? Why? 
Because this is the only way to make it ours and compel serv- 
ice from it. This is the only way to find our possibilities. 
We must let history tell us what other men have done, that 
we may know what we can do. The men of the past who 
walk the pages of history still live. Their ambitions are con- 
tagious, and they inspire us. Let no one despise the past. 



042 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

We have not outgrown the need of it. It has great men 
who are still in advance of us. 

The Christ looks out at us from the past. We are not 
through with the Christ, the man of Nazareth, who thought 
and spake and acted 1800 years ago. There are others with 
whom we are not through and whom we have not as yet over- 
taken. There are lost arts which we have not recovered, and 
a human genius of the past which is still in advance of modern 
genius. 

There are things in the past that have never been reached. 
In stability of institutions China has not been surpassed. 
In skill of mechanics Egypt has not been reached. How 
were those great Egyptian structures which look us in the 
face reared? The splendor of Assyria and Babylonia has 
never been equalled. These old kingdoms have been dug up 
by the pick and spade of our day, and we are compelled to 
stand before their ruined grandeur appalled. 

Nineteen centuries of Christendom have not added to the 
grace of the Greek column or to the strength of the Roman 
arch. No Book of Proverbs has gone beyond the wisdom of 
Solomon. The sense for beauty in the old Greeks, and the 
sense for organization in the old Romans, and the sense for 
righteousness in the old Jews, can still lead us. No one has 
plucked the laurels from the brow of Homer; no brush has 
stolen a single tint from the fame of Apalles; no chisel has 
chased a line of loveliness from Phidias. The principles of 
the Mosaic legislation, many of them, are still grand; and 
the works of Plato and Socrates and Aristotle are republished 
to-day and are quoted as authorities by modern philosophers. 

Paul's logic and thought are as much abreast the times now 
as they were the day he uttered them. While we have out- 
grown the past in ever so many ways, yet enough of the great- 
ness of the past remains and towers above us as to create 
within us a wholesome respect for the past. Where we can- 
not excel the past let us willingly allow it to wear its laurels. 
Let us run out on lines on which we can excel. It is our 
privilege to excel where we can, and it is equally our privilege 
to use what we cannot excel. If the past has given us any 



SERMON — REV. DAVID GREGG. 943 

great thing which we cannot equal, that is a reason for being 
thankful to the past. 

While there are things belonging to the past which we can- 
not equal, still we are making progress. Shakespeare is not 
equalled, but yet there is progress in the coming of Words- 
worth and Browning and Tennyson, and also in the coming of 
our transatlantic poets, Longfellow and Lowell and Whittier. 
By their coming we own Shakespeare none the less. They 
are the ue plus. They give us what Shakespeare does not 
give us and they will fill a place and do a work which he cannot 
fill and do. 

Then, besides there is a growth in this, viz. : Men, as time 
has moved on, have become better able to understand Shake- 
speare. He is more of a power than ever before, because of 
the general and universal growth which enables men to use 
him more. What we say of Shakespeare we might also say 
of Paul. Paul has not been equalled, but Paul has produced 
Augustine and Luther and Spurgeon, and the world is better 
off with Paul, plus these men. Besides this, because of the 
spread of Christianity, there are more people using Paul. 
All this is growth. 

There will never be another Columbus. There will never 
be an opportunity for any other man to do the one thing 
which he did. Still, there is growth and progress in the 
world. The right use of the continent, which Columbus un- 
veiled, is progress. To-day we are really celebrating the 
progress made on the new continent during the past four 
hundred years. We are celebrating the period rather than 
the man. 

This leads me to ask the question: "And what of the man 
as a factor in the past? How shall we place him and rate 
him? " To my mind Columbus derives all his importance from 
the fact that God used him and he did one thing which 
resulted in profit. So far as he himself was concerned, and 
so far as his plans went, he was a mere accident in relation to 
the grandeur of what we to-day find in this new world. 

It is the Columbian era that is everything, and not Columbus. 
He had not the first conception of the plan which God was 



944 OUll NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

working out. God saw the American Republic — he did not. 
God saw human freedom — he did not. God saw a New 
"\V or lcl — he saw only what he supposed was an old world. 
He was only the chisel in the hand of the great God Sculptor. 

But what does the chisel know of the figure of beauty 
locked up in the marble? Nothing. But it matters not that 
the chisel is ignorant if the sculptor only have the knowledge. 
If the sculptor has in his soul the glowing ideal, the Apollo, 
the Venus, the Moses will as a necessity step out from the 
marble into the vision of the admiring world. It is God over 
man, ruling and planning and working out His glorious and 
perfect ideal for the human race that carries the security and 
progress of the human race. This is the highest thing that I 
can say of Columbus — he was an instrument in the hand of God, 
whereby God chiselled out the future according to the pattern 
of an infinite ideal. 

In the discovery of America God is everything. He was 
the only intelligent actor. He alone saw what relation the 
opening of America sustained to the civilization which was 
to follow. This being true, I argue that one of the lessons 
which America should learn from the study of its own history 
is this: God has a mission for America; God has a claim upon 
America, and America should joyfully and voluntarily work 
out its mission, and should absolutely and whole-heartedly 
give itself up to God. 

In giving ourselves to the study of the discovery of America 
let us put to the fore-front of our thinking this fact : The 
discovery of America was not the simple and instantaneous 
affair which it is tacitly assumed to be. It was a long pro- 
cess. It was not an event at all — it was an evolution. 

There is a pre-Columbian history and there is a post- 
Columbian history, and both of these are as important as the 
history of the man Columbus himself. The former opened 
the way for Columbus and made him a possibility; the latter 
took up what he did and developed it and made it effective. 

Without the after-explorers, the Cabots, Americus Vespu- 
cius, Magellan, Cortes, De Soto, Balboa, La Salle, Champlain 
and Hudson, the discovery of Columbus would have been 



SERMotf— iit-;y. bAVll) GREGG. 945 

like the discoveries which preceded it— it would have been a 
comparatively fruitless affair. It is equally true that Columbus 
needed what preceded him in order to his making, as well as 
who followed him in order to his development. 11 is inspiration 
as an explorer grew out of what preceded him. 

Let us turn a few pages of the pre-Columbian history aud 
see how the world was working up to his one great event: 
his first voyage— for this voyage was really the only thing in 
Columbus's life that had any glory in it. Pre-Columbian 
history tells us that Columbus was not the first discoverer of 
America. He was only one discoverer among many. He 
was only the recoverer of America. 

At the time the bold Genoese planned his scheme of reach- 
ing the Indies by a westward route, documents were in exist- 
ence, the Scandinavian Sagas, giving particulars of several 
visits to the Northern American continent 500 years before. 
From these writings we gather the following: 

Iceland was settled by the Norsemen a. d. 874. From 
Iceland the Norsemen pushed up to Greenland. Eric, the 
Red, founded a settlement there in 986. This settlement he 
named after himself, Ericsfiord. One of Eric's companions 
was an Icelander named Bardson, who had a son, Biron, then 
absent in Norway. When Biron came back to Iceland he was 
told that his father had gone to Greenland. 

He at once determined to follow him. On this voyage 
contrary winds bore him away from Greenland and carried him 
to the coast of North America. As this land did not corre- 
spond with the description he had of Greenland he refused to 
land. Turning his course northward he continued until he 
reached Greenland. The distance from the southern point of 
Greenland to Labrador is only 600 miles, but little more than 
the distance from Norway to England. 

Biron was the first European to discover the shores of North 
America. This was nothing in itself, but it led to something 
further. Biron related his experience to Eric, and Leif, the 
son of Eric, fitted out an expedition to go ami explore this 
land. He sailed in the year L000 a.m., with a crew of twenty- 
five men. In four days they came to Labrador, after that to 



940 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Nova Scotia; from here they sailed until they reached an 
island which they called Vineland, because of its abundance 
of grapes. This island was somewhere off the coast of Mas- 
sachusetts or Rhode Island. Here they erected huts and 
save the settlement filename of Leifsbuthir. 

It is to Leif Ericson that Boston has erected a monument on 
Commonwealth avenue, its leading avenue. It was my privi- 
lege to be in Boston at the unveiling of this monument. Leif 
Ericson returned to Iceland and the accounts which he gave 
of America caused another expedition to sail, 1004 a. d., 
under Thorwald. Thorwald landed on a promontory below 
Cape Cod, Mass. Here he was attacked by the Indians. In 
the battle he received a wound which proved fatal. His last 
words were the request : " Let me be buried on yonder pro- 
montory, which I so admire." His followers carried out his 
request and then returned home. This was the first white 
man's grave on our continent. 

The third expedition was a failure. It was under the 
third son of Eric, who sailed with his wife Gudrida, the 
first white woman explorer to come to the shores of America. 
Its object was to bring back the body of Thorwald, buried 
on the New England promontory. This expedition sailed 
from Iceland, but when it reached Greenland Thorstein died. 
The next spring his widow brought the ship back to Iceland. 

In the summer of the following year, 1000, a much more 
important expedition was fitted out. It was under the com- 
mand of Thornfinn, the Hopeful. Thornfinn, captivated by the 
charms of Gudrida, Thorstein's widow, married her and 
brought into his life her daring and courage. There were 
three ships and 140 men in this expedition — a larger expedi- 
tion than of that of Columbus. As this was an attempt to 
found a permanent colony, all sorts of necessaries were taken 
on board the ships, including live stock and domestic animals. 

This expedition came down as far as Martha's Vineyard 
and anchored in Buzzard's Bay. While here one of the cap- 
tains of the company, Thorhall by name, was dispatched with 
a small ship to look for the settlement of Leif Ericson. This 
man had a most untoward fate. A westerly gale took him 



SKKMOX— REV. DAVID GREGG. 9 I ] 

and drove him right across the Atlantic to the coast of [re- 
land, where he' and his crew were all made slaves. 

Thorhall, although against his will, was the first to hold 
the honor of sailing right across the Atlantic Ocean, from 
shore to shore. And what is still more remarkahle, this first 
voyage from the one continent to the other, in a temperate 
zone latitude, was from west to east, from the New World to 
the Old World. 

Meanwhile Thornfin prosecuted his journey further south 
and founded a colony. Here in this American colony Thorn- 
finn and Gudrida were blessed by the birth of a son, the first 
native-born American of European parents. The new son 
received the name Snorre. lie was taken to Iceland when 
the colony after great hardships, returned home, and after- 
ward he became a famous scholar and bishop. 

Among his lineal descendants are included Thorwaldsen, 
the famous sculptor. How strange to think that the great 
Norwegian sculptor's genealogy should come by the way of 
America! It is supposed that Snorre wrote the Sages from 
which we have derived this information about these voyages 
of the hardy Norsemen, the most daring mariners of ancient 
times. 

Had the Icelandic explorers only possessed what Columbus 
possessed, viz. : firearms, to enable them to successfully defend 
themselves against the Indians, North America would have 
been the first to have been Europeanized. A race of men 
equal to any upon the globe would have been here. But as it 
was, nothing came out of these explorations save that a i'rw 
furs were taken to Iceland and a cargo or two of American 
timber. 

The discovery by the Norsemen was not the only pre- 
Columbian discovery of America. Frederick Saunders, the 
librarian of the Astor Library, New York, has just published 
the story of another pre-Columbian discovery. His story is 
the story of a Welsh colony, which, under the leadership of 
Prince Modoc, of Wales, settled in the twelfth century among 
the red men of the West. This colony continued to presreve 
its native speech and customs for live hundred years. This 



048 OUtl NATIONAL Jtbi;/ke. 

accounts for the puzzling wonder discovered in after times, 
viz., certain clans of Indians who spoke the Welsh vernacular. 
They received their speech from this Welsh colony. 

There is still another story to be noticed. It is in effect 
this: In 1482 — ten years before the voyage of Columbus — 
a Spanish pilot named Sanches, while attempting a passage 
between Madeira and the Canaries, was driven from his course 
by a storm and landed on the shores of an island said to be 
Haiti. Subsequently this pilot came to Lisbon and found 
lodgment with Columbus, to whom he related the facts, and 
at whose house he subsequently died. 

How much inspiration Columbus got from the Norsemen 
we cannot assert, but this we can assert : He sailed as far 
north as Iceland, where Scandinavian Sages were, which con- 
tinued the stories of the Norsemen voyages. The air of his age 
was full of the spirit of navigation, and he breathed that air. 
He had the writings of Marco Polo and John de Mandeville. 
Both of these men were audacious romancers and explorers. 

They had pushed to the very limits of the East and their ac- 
count of its gold and luxury set all Europe on fire with a desire 
to possess the treasures of the East. The art of printing had 
brought out of their hiding places the old classics, and 
Columbus had these. Some of these spoke of an Atlantic 
land. Columbus had married the daughter of a distinguished 
explorer. While a girl she had made several hazardous 
voyages with her father, and was an enthusiast herself. 
Through her Columbus came into possession of all the results 
of her father's experience, as she inherited his charts and. 
journals. 

But, above all, the famous letter of Toscannelli had been 
written. This scholar, in his letters, openly advocated the 
practicability of reaching Japan and China by sailing directly 
west. This was precisely what Columbus attempted to do; 
this is what he thought he had done, and he died thinking 
so. He died ignorant of the fact that it was a new world 
that he gave Castile and Leon. 

We have now reached the story of Columbus himself. For 
eighteen years he cherished his vision. For eighteen years 



SERMON - — REV. DAVID GREGG. 949 

he believed in himself. This was the secret of his power. 
For eighteen years he knocked in vain at the doors of the 
courts of the reigning monarchs of Europe. At last lie won 
the confidence of that queenly woman, Isabella. She became 
the power back of Columbus and the power that sustained 
him till through his Atlantic career. It was a woman's faith 
and a woman's smile of encouragement that were back of 
the effective discovery of America, and this woman came upon 
the scene at the critical moment — the moment of peril. 

The little fleet of three vessels, the Santa Maria, the Pinta 
and the Nina, sailed for Palos August ;>, 1492. The three 
crews consisted of about one hundred men in all. How were 
these crews recruited? Men were not anxious to go on such 
a foolhardy journey. They peopled the ocean with all manner 
of horrid monsters. They had no faith in Columbus. They 
looked upon him as a man not rightly balanced in mind. It 
was, therefore, difficult to get a crew. 

Special inducements were offered. Immunity from the 
pursuit of justice was offered. Criminals were off ered pardon 
if they would go. Debtors were offered release from all 
obligations if they would go. The fleet was made up of 
runaway criminals and debtors. The character of the fleet 
accounts for the after mutinies and the after dangers of 
Columbus, who was at the mercy of such men. Neverthe- 
less the expedition was a success. 

Columbus successfully handled his crew. I do not need to 
relate the sufferings of the voyage, nor tell of the hopes and 
the fears. To me the thrilling part of the story is the end — 
reaching of land just when hope was about to become despair. 
The first thing that cheered the crew were the signs of ap- 
proaching shores. Herbage carried out by the tide floated 
around the ships. Land birds, with flashing plumage as 
brilliant as the hues of the rainbow, circled in the air over- 
head. They perched on the topmasts and poured out their 
thrilling songs of welcome. 

Lamartine tells us that a little bird's nest built on a branch, 
which the wind had broken off, and full of eggs, on which 
the parent bird was sitting, gracefully floated by one of the 



950 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

ships, now rising and now falling upon the swelling waves. 
That meant land without a doubt, and land very close at 
hand. All these were voices from the shores. They put 
soul into the careworn and exhausted sailors. The last night 
of suiling came and all the sails were tightly reefed. 

The ships draw near into a realm of intangible mystery. 
There is no sleep for a single soul; all minds are kindled 
with fever of intellectual suspense. Columbus walks the upper 
deck and scans the horizon with his eager eye. It is pitch 
dark. Suddenly he stops. What is it that gleams out yonder 
between sea and sky? He looks with all his might. What 
is it? As God lives, it is a light — a light! Yes, but what sort 
of a light? It cannot be a star; it is not diamond-pointed as 
God's stars are. It is ragged and flickering, like every light 
of human kindling! Alas! it is gone. 

It was the illusion of an over-wrought brain. No; there 
it is again. It moves; it waves; it is a torchlight upon some 
shore. Hark! a great boom sounds from the Pinta. Her 
guns sound again and again. God be praised! Her crew, too, 
has seen the light on the shore. It is all settled; for that is 
land, and that is a light on the shore, carried by an Indian 
hand. The voyage is a success. Columbus has won his great- 
est glory. 

You know what followed — the landing the next morning, 
the setting up of the cross, the prayer to God and the song 
of praise. You know the return to Spain: the reception by 
King and Queen; the procession at Barcelona, with its Ameri- 
can Indians in front, its American products, its gold and 
spices and its treasures. You know, too, the enthusiasm for 
exploration which followed, and how quickly a new expedition 
was fitted out with a different type of fleet and crew. A 
skyrocket of success had gone up into the sky, and brilliant 
showers of enthusiasm fell all over Europe. 

We have passe 1 in our narrative the zenith of Columbus's 
glory. There was nothing great after this. There were 
voyages, but they were fruitless. There were mutinies, 
cruelties, slavery, disappointment, displacements, sickness, 
chains, poverty, neglect, a broken heart, death. When Queen 



SERMON— REV. DAVID GREGG. 051 

Isabella died Columbus lost his only influential friend. Fer- 
dinand, the King, only trilled with him. Columbus cost him 
more money than he brought in. All his discoveries in a 
monetary point of view weue failures but money, riches, these 
were the things Ferdinand wanted, and these were the things 
Columbus promised to secure. 

The story of Columbus's death is a sad one. lie died ne- 
glected and forsaken. He died so obscurely that his death was 
scarcely known, lie died in a little room, bare and unsightly, 
•the only ornaments being the chains which bound him when 
he was seut home from America as a prisoner. The priest 
was there and a few attendants, hut that was all. These tell 
us that he said, "Father, into Thy hands I commend my 
spirit," and then all was over. 

Do you wonder that he died unnoticed and forgotten? The 
reason was, others had pushed past him in the rush of the 
age. The exploits of other voyages had caught the public ear 
and monopolized public attention. Americus Vespucius had 
returned from his second voyage and was talking to all 
Europe of things Columbus knew nothing about. The Cabots 
had been to North America and were talking about that. 
Columbus never put foot upon North America. Balboa and 
Magellan had already completed their apprenticeship and 
were on their way to the Pacific Ocean. 

Already the fishermen from Portugal were plying their 
vocation upon the banks of Newfoundland with profit, and 
Yalasco, the Spaniard, was on his way to the St. Lawrence. 
The daring and the successor others overshadowed Columbus, 
and he was lost sight of by the great world. This was the 
reason he was allowed to die in the lonely and unnoticed way 
he did die. 

Such is the story of Columbus told in a broken, fragmentary 
way. What now is our judgment with regard to him? He 
is not the Columbus who was the object of our hero-worship 
when we were children. The search light of history has 
cleared his life of myths and has completely obliterated the 
Columbus of romance. It is shown that most of the thrilling 
stories about Columbus which have captivated us are to be 
regarded as apocryphal. 



f J52 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

The world hitherto has been worshipping an idealized man 
and not the real man. Columbus was not a saint. I say 
this in the interest of accurate scholarship. Such works as 
those ol Henry Harrisse Winsor, the librarian of Harvard, 
and Dr. Adams, the late President of Cornell, show that 
Columbus can never be canonized on merit, because of his 
character. His character is a thing exceedingly problematical. 

The works of these scholars which I have mentioned are 
all written in the interest of the truth, and after the modern 
idea of fairness and impartiality in biography writing. The* 
old idea of the biographer was this: He must be the eulogist, 
and apologist, and advocate of his hero. The modern idea 
of the biographer is this: He must first and always seek the 
facts, and tell the truth about the man whose biography he 
writes. 

These are some of the facts in the story of Columbus. He 
was a pirate in the early part of his life. He sailed several 
times with the Portuguese slave ships to the coast of Guinea to 
capture slaves. In his journal he admits that land was first seen 
and announced by Eoderigo de Triana, of the "Pinta," at 2 
o'clock, October 12, but on his return to Spain he set up the 
demand for himself that he first saw land, and claimed and 
received from the sovereigns the special money which had been 
offered as a reward to the man who should first see the land. 

His will shows that his son Fernando was born out of wed- 
lock. His first letters glow with accounts of the gentleness 
of the Indians. He praises their hospitality. When his 
vessel was shipwrecked they gave him every possible aid, some 
of them even shed tears of sympathy. You know what fol- 
lowed, how he repaid this kindness and love of the Indians. 

I cannot speak of the horrors inflicted upon the Indian 
women. And there was no protest from Columbus. Nay, 
he made excuses for the conduct of his brutal crew. Because 
husbands protected their wives and daughters and declared 
war to the hilt of the knife, he captured and enslaved the 
red men and shipped whole cargoes of Indians as slaves to 
Spain. This he did in the face of the rebuke administered 
t<> him by Queen Isabella, 



SERMON— REV. DAVID GREGG. 953 

He advocated and prosecuted the slave trade as a means of 
procuring riches for Spain. His chief aim in all that he did 
was riches. Above all things he was eager for gold and fame 
and titles and personal advancement. But was there no 
religion in his life? There was. It was not nineteenth 
century religion, however. 

He always carried the cross with him, and he always said he 
would devote his gains to a crusade to take the Holy Sepulchre 
out of the hands of the infidel Moslems. That constituted 
religion in his day. Charles V. was religious; Philip II. was 
religious; they erected the cross everywhere, and in the name 
'of the cross committed all manner of crimes. The religion of 
Columhus was akin to their religion. 

One reason why we should be thankful to-day is that religion 
has grown since the day of Columbus. To be religious after 
his kind to-day would put a man behind the prison bars, and 
blackball his character out of the fellowship of the true church 
of God. What I rejoice in to-day is this — the world has out- 
grown Columbus and the religion of Columbus, and demands 
an infinitely higher type of manhood. 

When I put Columbus upon the back-ground of 1802 I can 
find nothing in him to admire but his genius and his faith in 
himself and his push. Following his faith and genius he 
performed a work he did not know he was performing, and 
became a benefactor of the world by accident. If you wish 
to respect Columbus you must keep him back in L492. 

One act of this man is all that I celebrate, viz., his running 
the prow of the Santa Maria upon the American shore. I 
celebrate the period which follows that act. I celebrate the 
progress which Cod has evolved by means of the years between 
1492 and 1892. 

Farewell Columbus. I honor you back there in 1492. You 
are better than Ferdinand; you are better than Bobadilla; 
you are better than Ovanda. I deplore the treatment you 
received from these; it was unjust and cruel. You are better 
than Charles V. and Philip 11., but [ prefer the nineteenth 
century. I prefer liberty to slavery. 

I prefer the policy of William Penn to the policy of the 



054 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

bullet and the knife in dealing with the Indians; I prefer the 
virtue that respects the womanhood of all races, to the virtue 
that can keep silent because the womanhood being trampled 
nnder foot is that of an alien race. I celebrate the period. I 
celebrate the fact that we are four centuries away from 
Columbus. As an American I celebrate America — American 
progress — American opportunity. 
/ Let me give you some of the points which I keep before 
my mind as an incentive to this Columbian eelebration. We 
are celebrating the science of discovery and not the science 
war. 

This indicates a new epoch in history-making, and to me* 
there is no index of a better advance than this new epoch. 
What has history been hitherto ? AYhat has controlled history ? 
"Who have figured upon the pages of history, captivating eye 
and heart, and making the future of mankind? These are 
leading questions. Tell me what history is and I will forecast 
for you the coming future. History has a power parallel to 
the power of fine painting. In the art salons in the palace of 
Versailles there are miles and miles of battle scenes. 

Any one can tell what the education, gotten through the 
eye by pictures, means. It means the domination of France 
by the spirit of militarism. Put other pictures in that 
national art gallery, pictures of the leading French scientists, 
pictures illustrative of their experiments, pictures showing 
their marvellous triumphs, and you will make the rising 
generation scientists and give the spirit of science the domi- 
nation of the land. 

I want to assert it here, that, according to my thinking, it 
is a gross outrage upon all the principles of Christianity when 
Christendom is busy making swords and spears and Gatling 
guns and ironclads. When it is busy doing this it is clashing 
with God's pacific purposes and smiting the cross with light- 
ning. War and the cross are as much in antagonism as were 
the cruel slavery of Columbus forced upon the Indians and 
the dying love of Jesus symbolized by the cross which he 
erected upon American shores. 

I hold history largely responsible for the existence of war. 



SERMON — REV. DAVID GREGG. 955 

History is written in such a way to make war popular. Who 
walk the pages of history? Warriors, and they are represented 
as the great heroes of the world, almost the sole heroes of the 
■world. They crowd all others into the background. History 
must be rewritten. War heroes must he made to take a sub- 
ordinate place in history. The world's thinkers and workers, 
the world's missionaries, scientists, educators— these must he 
crowned with laurels. 

The genius of industry must be exalted. When this is 
done men will aim at being missionaries, educators, explorers, 
scientists, philanthropists, workers. Such celebrations as this 
lead to this needed rewriting of the world's history and of the 
exaltation of character, and of life, and of exploits that make 
for peace, and for the triumph of mind and soul in the world. 

Another point I keep before my mind for recognition and 
inspiration. It is this: We are celebrating the over-rule of N 
God in human history. 

Columbus is nothing. God is everything. God could 
have discovered America without Columbus. It was discov- 
ered independent of Columbus and in another way. While 
Columbus was struggling with his rebellious colony in His- 
panola, Pedro Cabral, a citizen of Portugal, with a fleet of 
thirteen, sailing on his way to Calcutta, was blown across the 
Atlantic Ocean to Brazil. It was because of this fact that 
Portugal afterward claimed Brazil. Portugal virtually owned 
it even down to the days of Dom Pedro, when it became a 
republic. 

God works in long periods, and this is illustrated in the 
history of the discovery and population of America. Vet, 
while God works in long periods, everything is timed to the 
hour, and each event has its place and order. The compass 
must come to make navigation possible. The astrolabe and 
quadrant must come, so that the navigator can make out his 
exact distance from the equator by the altitude of the sun. 

These instruments make man perfectly at home upon the 
sea; they unchain the ocean from the old bondage of timidity 
and fear. Now men may learn that God intended the ocean 
not to be a dividing waste, separating continent from conti- 



956 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

nent, but He meant it to be a highway between land and land, 
whitened with the sails of a universal commerce. 

After the opening of the highways of the sea the art of 
printing must come; and then the art of making paper. These 
give the Bible to the world. It is time now for the discovery 
of America, a new land for a new and a higher life; and 
//America is discovered. But mark you, while discovered, 
America is not at once populated. The time has not come 
for that. It must be explored first and the world must be 
taught just what America is. 

A century and a half passes before God let the people in. 
A century and a half is needed for the Bible to work its way 
in Europe and prepare a people for the prepared land. At 
the right time the prepared people come to New England and 
build up institutions there according to the teachings of the 
Scriptures. The Atlantic coast is made a fountain of liberty, 
and law, and righteousness. 

When the Atlantic coast becomes strong enough to influence 
the whole land for God and truth, a Western pioneer finds a 
flake of gold in the Rockies, and in a single decade a whole 
nation pours out into the great West. I can see the forma- 
tive hands of God as clearly in the construction of our nation, 
as I can see those same hands in the construction of that great 
American wonder, the Niagara cataract. 

/ Our republic is the Niagara in the landscape of the nations. 
What roar and dash and tumultuous rolling and wild hurri- 
cane there are in the waters of Niagara. There is devouring, 
perplexing, fermenting, bewildering activity. But out of 
this roar, and dash, and wildness, and fury, there rises a silvery 
column of spray, which the sun tints into loveliness and rain- 
bow splendors. 

Niagara is a type of our republic, and the type becomes 
clearer and clearer as we ponder our nation's history. What 
see we in America from the platform of history? Changes, 
revolutions, strifes, sects and factions pitted against sects and 
factions; wars, foreign and civil; cruel slavery, confederacies 
of evil ; but out of the turbulence and conflict of opinion rises 
£he republic, purified from slavery and with a hundred insti- 



SKHMOX — RKV. DAVID CREGU. 957 

tntions for the free development of mankind; with a soil to 
produce the bread of life, and with a welcome to the oppressed 
of all lands. 

Not the gold of nations, nor the glory of kings, nor the 
pride of power made the discovery of America worth while; 
no — the tremendous impulse and opportunity which it gave 
to mental activity, and the wonderful loosening of shackles 
which it brought and the field which it furnished for the 
American republic — these only made the discovery of America 
worth while. 

I can mention only one point more. It is this: We are 
celebrating the possibilities of the future. Whose future? 
Our future. For it is true what Emerson says: "America 
stands for opportunity." It stands for opportunity in the 
development of a magnificent patriotism to a nation of mag- 
nificent ideals. I am glad of one thing, and that is, this is a 
time devoted to the honoring of the American flag. 

The old flag is waved in our public schools, and it is floated 
from the windows of our homes. It is in the breeze every- 
where. This week in Chicago it will be thrown in the form 
of pyrotechnics into the open Heaven at midnight to blaze 
above the dedicated buildings of the World's Fair. 

One of the promised attractions of the week in Chicago is a 
fiery simulation of our country's flag floating in the air. A 
vast cloud of smoke will be tossed high into the dome to form 
the blue field; into this forty-four mortars will discharge as 
many bombs, carefully timed to explode simultaneously, which 
will form forty-four stars; others motors will fire shells at the 
same time, loaded with colored explosives, which, in burst- 
ing, will throw out long streamers of red, white, and blue to 
form bars — the whole will produce a gigantic American flag, 
with colors harmoniously blended. 

Americans, let this be the occasion when you shall run the 
Stars and Stripes up in your hearts, and you shall consecrate 
yourselves anew to the highest patriotism. The occasion this 
morning to utter this as my last word. 

As we are living in a hurst of national enthusiasm, this is 
the time above all times in which to set Christ forth as the 



058 OUTC NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

hope of the nation. Christ, has made us what we are; and 
it is requisite that we have Christ to keep us what we are. 
We want large manhood in our citizen. Only the manhood of 
Christ can produce that. We want the reign of holy prin- 
ciples in our land. Only Christ can teach us holy principles. 

We want the full establishment of the brotherhood of man 
in our land. Only Christ dimes in His heart the true type 
of the highest brotherhood of man. But He does. We want 
true liberty in our republic. Christ carries in Him the truth 
which carries in it the true liberty. '' If the son make you 
free, you shall be free indeed." 

Church of God, this is your hour for taking the nation for 
Christ. For this you have been equipped. For this God has 
given you gold and silver. For this God has given you men 
of character, and influence, and learning. For this God has 
allowed America to be discovered, and populated, and prospered 
There is no doubt about the willingness of God that America 
should be taken for Christ. 

The taking of it for Christ, or the not taking of it for Christ, 
is altogether a question of your willingness. When the churches 
of this land say. "America shall be Christ's," and mean what 
they say, and put their declaration into home missionaries, 
and into home missionary money, and into home missionary 
work, America shall be Christ's. 



CHRISTOPHER COLUMBUS: A MODERN ABRAHAM. 
REV. ROBERT 8. MACARTHUR, D.D. 

CAVALRY BAPTIST CHURCH, NEW YORK. 

"And he went out not knowing whither he went." I need 
scarcely remind you that these words were originally spoken of 
Abraham, the father of the faithful. You know that he was 
ignorant of the country to which he was to be led. Doubt- 
less he had some intimation of its nature, and also of the 
general direction in which it lay; but it must be remembered 
that his knowledge of geography was very imperfect, that the 
country, judged by the mode of travel of that day, was very 
distant, that it lay beyond a trackless desert, and that prob- 
ably no traveller had ever made the journey and returned to 
report. Abraham's position, therefore, was trying in the 
extreme. Strong faith was needed on his part; strong faith 
was possessed by him, and a grand result in glory to God and 
in blessing to the race was secured as the result of that faith. 

Had these words been written by the pen of inspiration of 
Columbus they could ;:ot more fittingly state the facts in his 
case. He, too, went out not knowing whither he went, and 
he never fully knew; he died under an utter misapprehension 
of the nature of the country he had visited and of the character 
of the discoveries he had made. He, too, realized the neces-i t y 
of great faith, and of divine guidance. God went before 
Abraham, and before even Columbus, although he was a very 
imperfect man, as truly as when by the pillar of cloud by day 
and the pillar of fire by night He went before the children of 
Israel on their weary march. 

This journey on the part of Columbus was begun during a 
time of great interest in the history of Spain, and in the 
history of the world. It was the time of the revival of learn- 
ing; the time of the birth of the great Protestant Reformation, 
and with it came a vast increase of intelligence. The days 
of monkish ignorance were happily passing away, and the 



M OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

dawn of light was at hand. About this time came the in- 
vention of the printing-press, and the discovery of the mariner's 
compass, and soon the discovery of America itself. Then came 
many navigators such as Vespucci, Cabot, Verrazani and 
others; and later those who laid the foundations of this 
republic, planting the seeds which have blossomed and bloomed 
into the flower and fruit of the liberty we enjoy to-day. it 
may be well, however, for us to glance for a moment or two 
at some of the previous voyages which we have reason to 
believe were made to our shores. Our esteemed friend, Mr. 
Frederick Saunders, the librarian of the Astor Library, in 
his recent book entitled "The Story of the Discovery of the 
New World," reminds us that in the fifth century of our era 
the Chinese sent Hoei-Shin, a Buddhist monk, who, it is 
believed, reached this continent and visited what is now called 
Mexico. Then came the Northmen. They were the sea- 
rovers of the world ; they were the terror of Europe from the 
North Sea to the Mediterranean Sea. In 860 of our era they 
discovered Iceland; having been driven by a fierce storm they 
landed upon what was to them an unknown shore, a shore, 
which became a permanent settlement of their countrymen. 
A similiar accident drove them to the coasts of what is now 
Greenland. Two of their number, named Leif and Bjarni, 
voyaged along the coast and discovered what is now Newfound- 
land. A little later, pressing their way onward, they reached 
Nova Scotia, which they called Marklancl because they found 
it well wooded. After two days more of sailing they made 
land on the coast of New England, perhaps at Plymouth 
County, Massachusetts. There is evidence leading us to 
suppose that on the shores of the Charles River near Cam- 
bridge, there are traces of houses erected by these Northmen. 
The more this subject is investigated the more conclusive the 
evidence of this seems to be. It is stated that the first child 
born of European parents on this continent — the first certainly 
so far as known — was Snorri, son of Karlsfre, born in what 
was called Vineland — in the year 1007 of our era; and what 
is very interesting, it is affirmed — I think on reasonably solid 
grounds — that Thorwaldsen, the great Danish sculptor, was 



SERMON — REV. ROBERT S. MACARTHUR. 961 

a descendant of this first child of European parents born on 
American soil. The manuscripts that are now preserved in 
the Royal Library of Copenhagen, manuscripts that were 
found in a monastery on the Island of Flato, on the west 
coast of Iceland, are authority for these statements. These 
manuscripts lay forgotten for centuries, but they have recently 
been discovered, and they confirm the opinion that many had 
vaguely cherished previous to their discovery. 

There are stories also of a Welsh colony, stories which seem 
to have an historical basis. It is said that this colony with 
Prince Madoc in command reached this country in the year 
1170. They made discoveries which are proving valuable in 
the development of American history. It is believed that 
some tribes of Indians as a result of this intermingling of 
races are partially of Welsh origin. Among these were the 
Mandans, whose color, Avhose hair and whose eyes were 
different from those of most Indian tribes. Their religious 
rites, their domestic habits, their mode of building their tents 
after the form of druidical abodes, such as we see in Great 
Britain, all point to an element of British life in this Indian 
race. I have been interested also in the discovery that the 
so-called Pawnee tribe are believed to have in them an inter- 
mingling of Welsh blood. The name of this tribe was originally 
spelled "Panis," but pronounced ■ "Pawnee," and so we 
have come to have the spelling that is common in our own day. 

It would be quite unfair in any historical summary to pass 
over the work done by Prince Henry of Portugal. He was 
one of the great navigators of the Portuguese race. He 
stimulated many travellers and made many interesting discov- 
eries in the Mediterranean and in other seas. He gave up the 
pleasures of the court and lived on the promontory of Sagres, 
in which secluded and inhospitable place he devoted himself 
to the study of nautical science, building observatories, col- 
lecting charts, and with princely liberality securing the aid of 
the most skilled and the bravest navigators. Great honor 
should be given to this noble prince, while to-day and during 
this week, we are recounting the names of America's discov- 
erers in different parts of the world. 



962 Our national jubilee. 

The times in which Columbus lived, and especially those 
which marked the beginning of his voyages, were times of 
profoundest interest to all students of history. The great wars 
in Spain, leading to the expulsion of the Moors, were still in 
progress during the earlier part of his residence in that country, 
but were n earing their completion. Isabella and Ferdinand 
were united in hand and heart under a patriotic and religious 
movement for the conquest of the Moors and for driving them 
from Spanish soil. It was a time of great excitement through- 
out the entire laud of Spain. Columbus himself was present 
at the battle and conquest of Granada. When this last 
stronghold of the Moors was taken Isabella and Ferdinand 
entered into Granada in triumph, while 300,000 Moors marched 
out, bedewing the soil of their beloved city with their patriotic 
tears and with their heart's blood. Columbus was present. 
He, perhaps, saw Cardinal Mendoza ascend the Torre de la 
Vela and first raise the Christian flag, while he shouted, 
" Granada is taken ! Granada is taken !" It was also the 
time of the Inquisition. This is a page of Spanish history 
which many eulogists of Spain and encomiasts of Columbus 
will not mention to-day. It is a page of history not very 
welcome to us, standing beneath this American flag and 
standing upon this American soil; but he would be a faithless 
historian and an unjust narrator who should not make allusion 
to this vile blot on the history of Spain, on the name of 
Christianity and on the human race itself. Isabella never 
gave willingly her consent to the introduction of the Inquisi- 
tion. It was, as Prescott has reminded us, wrung from her 
under the influence of her priestly confessors; and it was, as 
Prescott further says, the only stain in the pure white marble 
of Isabella's life. But it should be borne in mind that Pres- 
cott is unduly eulogistic of this queen; more careful writers 
are now showing her in her true character as a woman of at 
least the average cruelty of her time and Church. She was 
induced to give her consent to the Inquisition because of the 
greater glory which she was led to believe it would bring to 
the Roman Church; but Ferdinand endorsed it because of 
the gold it would bring into the Spanish coffers. "Wherever 



SERMON— REV. ROBERT S. MACARTHUR. 963 

there was a rich Jew he hecame the subject of the Inquisition ; 
wherever there was a Protestant, rich or poor, he must be 
tortured by the Inquisition. God had a great purpose in 
the discovery of America just at that hour. Europe was 
overcrowded; liberty was strangled; hope was dying. The 
Jews were driven from Spain, the Moors soon crossed the 
strait to their native soil, and God flung wide open the doors 
of this New World that there might be a place where 
liberty could breathe, and where a republic could be horn. 

Time permits me only to touch the history of Columbus 
very briefly and I do not regard it as very necessary that I 
should dwell in detail upon the history. His name is itself 
interesting. Columbus is its Latin form, Colombo the Italian 
form, and Colon is its Spanish form. Christoval Colon is his 
.Spanish name. The feminine form of Columbus means a 
dove, and Christopher means "Christ-bearer." He was born 
in Genoa, probably in the year 1436, though some say 144(1. 
His origin was very obscure; and the details of his life are 
extremely meagre. His father was Dominico Colomho, and 
was a wool-carder or comber by trade. In a will dated 1594 
he speaks of himself as "formerly a weaver." Some suppose 
that Columbus was of illustrious descent; but his son Fernando, 
the son of the Cordovan woman, but not the Cordovan wife, 
used wise words when he said, " I am of the opinion that 1 
should derive less dignity from any nobility of ancestry than 
from being the son of such a father." The mother of 
Columbus was named Susanna Fontanarossa, and there were 
in the family three sons and one daughter. The brothers 
were named Bartholomew, Giacomo and Diego. Bartholomew 
was sent to England to interview Henry VII.; the king gave 
him encouragement, and but for the action of Isabella 
England would have had the glory of the great discovery. 
The sister married a man in very humble life, a man whose 
name was Giacomo Baravello, but a man of no importance. 
In his boyhood Columbus was sent to the University of l'avia, 
where his studies were history, cosmography, philosophy and 
other sciences, and especially drawing. But at the age of 
fifteen he became a sailor, a fart which contributed much to 



964 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

his later taste for navigation. A relative of Columbus, who 
was named Columbus also, was commander of a cruiser in the 
service of Kene, Count of Provence, and Columbus made 
journeys with him to the Isle of Thule, now supposed to be 
Iceland. Doubtless many of these excursions were piratical, 
and he doubtless was a youthful pirate; but that was in an 
age when piracy was considered legitimate activity for the 
brave and dashing spirits of the youthful Genoese. During 
a sea-fight, when the opposing vessels were chained together, 
a fire broke out that was likely to destroy both vessels, and 
Columbus, it is said, leaped into the sea with an oar in his 
hand and swam six miles, reaching the coast of Portugal, and 
then walked to Lisbon, which was at that time the head- 
quarters of a number of navigators. This was probably about 
the year 1470, although all these dates are doubtful. His 
son Ferdinand, of whom I have spoken, has written an account 
of his father's personal appearance at this time. Although 
young, the son tells us that his hair was perfectly white, that 
he was tall and was commanding in appearance and in manner. 
He was married to Felipa Monis de Palestrello, daughter of 
an Italian cavalier, who was an able navigator, and had been 
Governor of Porto Santo, but who became poor and died leav- 
ing little except charts and instruments. Columbus helped 
in the support of his father's family and also his wife's by 
making maps and charts. At this time fables of unknown 
hinds were constantly repeated — fables of the Island o'f the 
Seven Cities and of the Island of St. Brandan, on which the 
Scottish priest landed in the sixth century. There came 
from Greece the story of Atlantis, which Plato was said to 
have learned from the Egyptians. The idea of a western 
nation was conceived when there came floating pieces of wood, 
strangely carved, great reeds and especially when the discov- 
ery was made of two bodies of a race widely different from the 
European. The idea of a western ocean -way to India filled 
the mind of Columbus, and soon he entered into correspond- 
ence Avith Toscanelli, who greatly strengthened his theories. 
With this conviction Columbus applied to Genoa, but Genoa 
refused the application; then to Venice, but Venice refused. 



SERMON — REV. ROBERT S. MAC ARTHUR. 965 

Then to John II. of Portugal, who long kept him waiting 
with half promises, finally dismissed him, and then sent out 
an expedition of his own, trying to secure the honor of dis- 
covery and to rob Columbus of his due. His wife died about 
this time, and he left Portugal in disgust at the treatment of 
the court and in deep domestic grief , and went first to Spain in 
1484. He proposed to the Duke of Medina Sidoniaand after- 
ward to the Duke of Medina Celi that they organize an excur- 
sion or discovery, but they declined. We find him next at Cor- 
dova, where the court was held for a time, and where prepara- 
tions were making for the final onset which resulted in the fall 
of Granada. A few weeks ago I went one Thursday morning 
through the streets of Cordova. Cordova is to-day only an 
echo, only a ghost of what it was then. It is now a decay- 
ing city; but the tramp of horsemen and splendor of the 
chivalry of the days of Ferdinand and Isabella were recalled 
to my mind. I sat for an hour and a half in the Grove of 
Oranges waiting for my train to arrive, and I could people 
the silent streets witli the flower and chivalry of Spain march- 
ing under the banner of Castile and Leon, and I could 
picture Columbus following the court to Cordova to press his 
suit. From Cordova he goes to Salamanca, where he pleaded 
his cause before the learned professors and philosophers, who 
laughed him to scorn. The mariner stood alone before that 
brilliant company of officials, civil and ecclesiastic, and heard 
them sneer at his proposals, and was himself almost over- 
whelmed by their opposition. 

We follow him as he turned his steps toward the Convent 
La Rabida, with his little boy, Diego, the son born at Porto 
Santo, the son of his dead wife, asking for bread and water, 
father and boy hungry, thirsty, friendless and unknown. But 
in his soul great thoughts were burning; while every ear was 
deaf and every heart was cold, his ear was open to the divine 
voice, which he was constantly hearing, and his heart was 
aglow with great plans. The prior became deeply interested, 
and gave him letters to Fernando de Talevera, confessor to 
Isabella. With these letters he hastened once more to the 
court; but the exchequer is empty and he leaves with little 



906 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

hope. I follow him for a moment as he comes down past 
Santa Fe and reaches the Bridge of Pines on his way to France. 
He turns his back on Spain; he is going to France, and 
France or England shall have the glory of the discovery. 
Bartholomew, his brother, has gone to England. Will these 
countries help? It is a critical moment; imperishable history 
is now making. There comes to Isabella a message from Luis 
de Santangel, begging her to listen to Columbus, He secures 
her consent, a messenger is despatched and reaches Columbus 
at the Bridge of Pines, and he turns and comes back into the 
presence of the. Queen. This was a turning-point in the 
history of Columbus — in the history of Spain. Isabella con- 
sented to an expedition, but Ferdinand complained that the 
war with the Moors had exhausted his exchequer. But she 
declared that she would undertake it for her own crown of 
Castile, and that she could sell her jewels for the money if 
necessary. All honor to Isabella! All honor to woman! 
Woman made the discovery of Columbus possible, and on her 
head to-day I put the crown of glory. Ferdinand finally 
acquiesced and the contract was signed by the sovereigns at 
Santa Fe, April 17th, 1492. 

August the 3d, 141)2, before daylight Columbus is watching 
the direction of the winds from the little monastery of La 
Ilabida. The voice of prayer is in his ear. It is eight 
o'clock. The winds fill the sails, and from Palos, with one 
hundred and twenty men on the IS'ina, the Pinta and the 
Santa Maria, he starts upon his immortal journey. 

It is not necessary, as my aim is not to give what can readily 
be found in books of reference, that I trace this journey or his 
subsequent discoveries; neither is it necessary that I should 
call your attention to the fact that through the influence of 
Bovadilla he was finally sent back in chains to Spain ; nor that 
I should remind you that on May 20th, 1506, alone and friend- 
less, moneyless and helpless, he died at Valladolid. Isabella was 
dead. Ferdinand was ungrateful; he never had the heart of 
a man. He finally gave Columbus a pompous funeral and a 
magnificent monument. It would nave been better if he had 
given him bread when he was starving and friendship when 
he was friendless. 



SERMON— REV. ROBERT S. MACARTHUR. 067 

Will you allow me now iu the few further minutes that I 
may claim to sum up the characteristics of this great man? 

Columbus was very far from being a perfect man; he does 
not even come up to the best ideas of his own age and reli- 
gion. More than that, perhaps, we ought not to expect; less 
than that we cannot permit without reasonable criticism. 
Attention has been called to the fact that during all these 
Columbian festivities not one descendant of the race discov- 
ered by Columbus will be present. The Carib race was utterly 
destroyed in a few years. All writers agree that the " In- 
dians," so-called by Columbus, were healthy and robust. It is 
also certain from many allusions that their numbers were great; 
but during the last twenty years the most careful research 
reveals no trace of the race. There is nothing more certain 
than that these early discoverers were thirsty for blood and 
greedy for gold. They enslaved these kind-hearted people, 
and drove them from the face of the earth. Las Casas tells 
us that 40,000 perished on one group of islands "in a short 
time by the sword of the soldier and the lash of the driver." 
The name of Columbus, it must be admitted, is stained by 
the blood of these innocent thousands, whose hospitality he 
readily received and whom he wickedly destroyed. Iu a 
large measure his glory is purely imaginary. He has had the 
credit of discovering America, and now America is discover- 
ing him. He died without any accurate knowledge of the 
country which he had discovered, and we have lived until 
lately without any accurate knowledge of him. We have 
idealized and so idolized him too long. School books have 
utterly misled the youth of our land. But the critical his- 
toric method of recent days shows Columbus in his true 
character. 

It shows us that he was a consummate deceiver; that he 
made deception a fine art; and that he cannot be called a 
chivalrous knight until theft, murder and slave-making are 
chivalrous acts. All who had dealings with him, from the 
sovereign to the sailor, as Dunlop has shown, treated him 
with distrust and aversion. In early life his voyage from the 
kingdom of Naples was marked by deception, and he dwells 



968 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

upon his crimes with special pride. Deception characterized 
his entries on the log-book of his western journey. It is very 
doubtful if he saw the light which he claims to have seen on 
the night of October 11th, but it is quite certain that he made 
a claim for the thirty crowns a year which "their highnesses" 
promised to him who should first see land, and that he cheated 
Benejo, the sailor to whom the honor and money belonged. 
His selfishness and arrogance are shown in his demands for 
liberal terms before he would enter upon his voyage of dis- 
covery, and yet he and those who would canonize him call this 
greedy, deceptive and cruel man the "Christ-bearer." He 
was as perfidious as he was pious, and it is not at all improbable 
that from Alonzo Sanchez, who died in his house, leaving 
charts and maps, he derived the knowledge which made his 
discoveries possible. It is well known that the Arabs enlight- 
ened Spain and all the world for centuries on all cosmograph- 
ical questions. Bishop Boyle, who was appointed by the 
Pope as apostolic vicar in these western lands, was so disgusted 
with the avarice, licentiousness and brutality of those under 
Columbus that he desired to return to Spain. Finally, acting 
with the authority of his position, he excommunicated 
Columbus. Columbus took revenge by refusing to furnish the 
Pope's vicar with necessary provisions, and as a result he was 
obliged to leave the New World. After Columbus had sent 
500 Indians to Spain as slaves he attacked these innocent sav- 
ages in the New World, who had so confidingly welcomed him 
as their guest, with twenty blood-hounds, and with horsemen 
more savage than the clogs, he butchered them with spear and 
lance, and the bloodhounds tore them in a manner too horrible 
to describe. Even Washington Irving has to admit the 
throwing of Moxica from the walls of the fortress of the 
fosse below, though this biographer softens the act by 
euphemistic phrase. He affirmed that gold was the greatest 
of blessings, as it not only secures happiness here, but he de- 
clared in so many words that it procured eternal salvation 
hereafter. Some of the innocent "heathen," seeing his love 
for gold, would hold a bit of it up and say, " Behold the Chris- 
tian's god !" If his besetting sin was not impurity it was 



SERMON — REV. ROBERT S. MACARTHUR. 9C9 

cupidity. As the originator of American slavery he never 
can receive the unqualified praise of those who, by blood and 
treasure, destroyed American slavery. Isabella, who has been 
altogether overpraised by Prescott and others, pretended to 
be much shocked at the slavery which he introduced, but in 
1503 she signed au order obliging these innocent Americans 
to toil as slaves. Against them it is likely that the charge of 
cannibalism made by Columbus was false, and was made to 
justify his cruelty towards them. It is almost certain that he 
wilfully misrepresented the facts concerning his discoveries 
in such matters as finding a race of men with tails, and 
equally foolish statements. He constantly contradicts him- 
self concerning the events of his own life. His son Fernando 
affirms that his father knew better than to suppose that he 
was on the border of Cathay, aud states that he gave out this 
impression, and named the people Indians, because all Euro- 
peans knew the immense wealth of the Indies. Koselly de 
Lorgues and other would-be cauouizers claim for Columbus 
all the virtues of a saint. Bancroft only incidentally mentions 
him, but correctly sets forth his many infirmities. Prescott, 
as is well known, tends constantly to adulation; but even he, 
when discussing the vagaries of Columbus, suspects "a tempo- 
rary alienation of mind." Aaron Goodrich shows a constant 
tendency to depreciation and even to denunciation. Dr. 
Shea, the Komanist, recognizes the fact that Columbus could 
never attach to himself either those above or below him, so 
that there were but few " who adhered loyally to his cause." 
Washington Irving has written of Columbus as if he had 
accepted a retainer to magnify all his merits and to deny, or 
at least minimize, all his demerits. His statements must often 
be taken with many grains of salt. Justin Winsor has written 
with equal intelligence and fairness. He has presented what 
seems to be the true picture of Columbus; this volume will 
be the standard for years to come. He has given both praise 
and blame, and sums up his character with historical accuracy 
and judicial candor. The volume by Mr. Frederick Saunders, 
of the Astor Library, will serve au admirable purpose as a 
popular presentation of the man and his times. 



070 OUJt NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

We shall all give him praise for his great perseverance. He 
overcame almost all the disadvantages of his youth; he over- 
came disappointments which might have dampened the' ardor 
of almost any discoverer or inventor. Amerigo Vespucci 
received the honor of giving his name to the New World, 
hut I ought to say that Vespucci was not responsible for this 
honor. We are indebted for the name of America to a German 
professor. Part of the writings of Vespucci were published 
in German, and this German professor gave to the new country 
the name of America. Humboldt, I think, has shown very 
clearly that Vespucci was not at all to blame, that he had no 
idea of robbing Columbus of honor; indeed, Columbus has 
had too much honor in connection with the discovery of this 
Western continent. Humiliating, indeed, it was to Columbus 
that he should have been sent back to Spain in irons, but he 
never lost hope, never lost courage; he preserved those irons 
to the very last; he had them hung up where his friends 
could see them, and he regarded them as a mark of honor. 
His perseverance never failed; when rejected at Genoa, re- 
jected at Venice, rejected in Portugal, delayed in England 
and delayed in Spain, he still persevered, amid all the trials of 
his immortal voyage until on the morning of the 12th of 
October, 1492, he saw the sand glistening on the shores of the 
New World, and in a little while heard one of the men on the 
Pintacall out, "Land! land!" and a new world was discovered. 

But most of all we emphasize the piety of Columbus, al- 
though it was often of a very questionable kind. The success 
of his enterprise was due to two errors — the supposed extent 
of Asia to the east, and the supposed smallness of the earth. 
Columbus never knew the land he discovered; he thought all 
the while he was going to India, and he stumbled on 
America. That is why he called the islands "West Indies," 
and why the inhabitants were called "Indians." He thought 
he was going to Asia; he thought Cuba was Japan. He was 
under the influence of Marco Polo, and constantly interpreted 
all he saw by the prejudices existing already in his mind, and 
he died without knowing the lands he had discovered, unless 
we can adopt the explanation which his son has given. He 



SERMON — REV. ROBERT S. MACARTHUR. 971 

died utterly in error as to their nature or as to the continent 
itself. God overruled these errors. Columbus was wrong in 
the main question, and his opponents at Salamanca were right 
when they affirmed that he could not find Asia by going in 
that direction, but he clung to his purpose, lie heard voices 
in dreams; he believed that he was prophesied of in many 
parts of the Word of God; that he was the subject of the 
prophecy in the nineteenth Psalm and the fourth verse, and 
the thought gave him hope and cheer: "Their line is gone 
out through all the earth and their words to the end of the 
world." That was his thought. lie wrote the sacred name 
of Christ on his banner and gave Him all honor. He landed 
on the shores of this New AVorld dressed in the resplendent 
robes of an admiral, with a sword in one hand and the banner 
of Christ in the other. The company fed upon their knees 
and praised God for His wonderful goodness. This New 
World was consecrated to God from the very moment of its 
tirst discovery. This country is a Christian land; the high- 
est authority has recently pronounced it to be a Christian land, 
and it ought to be recognized as a Christian land, and the 
holy Sabbath be observed when the great Columbian Exposi- 
tion shall be held. Woe to us as a people if we lower our flag, 
if we dishonor our history, if we forsake our God! 

When he had returned to Barcelona and had told his story 
before the King and Queen, all fell upon their knees and 
joined in singing the Te Dvu\n. Columbus was not a great 
man; in many important respects he was weak and wicked. 
But he was great in his perseverance; he was great in a certain 
conception which he had of religious truth; but he blundered 
constantly. He was in utter error as to the course he pursued 
and the countries he discovered. He was an utter failure as 
a planter of colonies and a ruler of men. No greater failure 
in the effort to plant colonies in any land can be discovered 
than the failure of Columbus in that regard. I want to hold 
the balances justly. I want to give praise where praise is due, 
and I want to withhold it from him where praise is not due. 
No sooner had he left the colonists than everything went to 
destruction. I have emphasized his failures and rightly, and 



072 OUR NATIONAL JUBTLEE. 

I have striven to give him the due meed of praise; hut there 
are chapters in the life of Columbus which are a reproach to 
a noble manhood, which are opposed to the laws of man and 
which are rebuked by the laws of God. Historians have 
immortalized him, poets have idealized him, and priests now 
would canonize him, although once some of them were ready 
to cannonade him. • In the Biblioteca Colombina is his tract, 
placed there by his son Fernando, written when he was afraid 
of the tortures of the Inquisition, because the priests believed 
that his discovery was against the Church and against their 
traditional interpretations of the Bible. 

He was buried at Valladolid, where he died; but soon his 
remains were taken to the Carthusian monastery of Las Cuevas, 
in Seville; the remains of Diego, the second admiral, were also 
buried there. But in 1536 the bodies of father and son were 
taken over the sea to Hispaniola, or San Domingo, and 
interred in the cathedral. In 1795 or 1796, on the occasion 
of the cession of that island to the French, the relics were 
transferred to the cathedral of Havana, where they now re- 
pose; if, indeed, the remains re-exhumed and reburied were 
those of Columbus, a matter which must remain doubtful. 

My beloved friends, life is a strange voyage. Beyond it is 
an unknown country. You and I are voyagers. There is only 
one bark in which we can safely sail — the bark of faith. 
There is only one banner under which we may make the 
journey — the banner of Christ. Columbus was an Abraham, 
for he went out not knowing whither he went. Columbus 
Avas a Moses, for he endured as seeing Him who is invisible. 
Oidy the man of faith is the man of power. Only He who 
can see the invisible can do the impossible. God grant that 
to-day in that bark we may be wafted by God's blessing, and 
may land at last on the shores of Heaven, where we shall sing 
a sweeter Te Deum than that which awoke the echoes on the 
soil of virgin America, or those amid the splendors of the 
court at Barcelona. 



COLUMBUS IN HISTOKY.* 
BY JOSEPH SANDERSON I). 1). 

EDITOR OF THE TREASURY MAGAZINE. 

Christopher Columbus was born at Genoa in 1435 or 
1430. He went to sea when fifteen years of age, and in 1470 
married the daughter of an Italian named Parestrello, from 
whom he obtained maps, etc., and learned to make them. 
While doing so he conceived the idea of land to the westward 
and made several voyages to the Azores and other places. In 
1482 or 1483 he laid his scheme of discovery before John II., 
of Portugal, but the scheme was finally ridiculed. The same 
result occurred at Genoa. On his way to Spain he stopped 
at a convent in Andalusia to get food, and through the 
Superior of the convent he obtained an audience of the queen, 
demanding, however, too much for his services. Negotiations 
were interrupted but were afterwards resumed and a contract 
sealed between him and their Catholic majesties, Ferdinand 
and Isabella, April 17, 1492. The expedition furnished him 
consisted of three ships named Santa Maria, Pinta and Nina, 
carrying in all 120 men which sailed on Friday, August 3, 
14'.)2, at eight in the morning. Various discouragements 
attended the voyage, but on the 18th of September, while bear- 
ing to the southwest, many birds were seen, indicating land 
was near, and on the 11th of October, a cane, a log of wood, a 
stick wrought with iron, a board, a stake covered with dog 
roses were fished up, and at ten o'clock at night Columbus saw 
and pointed out a light ahead; at two o'clock on the morning 
of the 12th land was sighted, which was an island, named 
by Columbus San Salvador. He landed in the morning bearing 
the royal banner of Spain and others bearing the banners of 
the Green Cross. Columbus took possession of the island for 
their Roman Catholic majesties of Castile and Leon. 

[In March of 1496 the Cabots, father and son, who resided 
in Bristol, England, were appointed by Henry VII. to the 

* Condensed from an article in " American Progress." 



974 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

command of a squadron of five vessels on a voyage of discovery 
in the Atlantic Ocean, and steering northwest on the 17th of 
June, 1497, the coast of Labrador, North America, was sigh ted 
and on the 24th of June at five o'clock in the morning, St. 
John's, Newfoundland, — afterwards the whole coast of North 
America from 67^° of latitude to 38°, or about 1800 miles of 
sea-coast, on all of which the Cabots were authorized to set 
up the royal banner of England and to possess the territories 
discovered by them as the King's vassals. Thus South America 
was discovered by Columbus and held for Spain, and has 
continued a Roman Catholic country; while North America, 
discovered by the Cabots who were commissioned by an English 
King and who took possession of it for him, has followed in 
the footsteps of England and become Protestant. This singular 
providence is worthy of note.] 

After several other discoveries Columbus returned to Spain 
in March 21, 1493, was received by their majesties in full 
court, related his adventures and discoveries and great honors 
were conferred upon him. He sailed with a second expedi- 
tion on the 25th of September, same year, having on board 
1,500 men and twelve missionaries. Land was sighted on Nov- 
ember 3d, and named Dominica; many other places were ex- 
plored and named. In visiting La Navidad, where he had built 
a fort, he found it burned and the colony dispersed. The 
climate proved unhealthy, the colonists greedy and mutinous, 
and Columbus sent a dispatch to their Catholic majesties, by 
which he founded the West India slave trade. After appoint- 
ing a regency council under his brother, he started out to sea 
again, but exhausted with fatigue, he lay five months sick in 
Isabella. The state of the colony was deplorable. Many 
Avere rebellious, and five shiploads of Indians were sent to 
Seville to be sold as slaves. Court favor about this time 
seemed partially withdrawn; a commissioner was appointed 
to inquire into the circumstance of his rule. He returned 
home, arriving in Cadiz on June 11, 1496. The sovereign 
assuring him of his favor, he asked for a new expedition, 
which after some delay was furnished, and on July 31, 1498, 
he discovered Trinidad ; on August 1st, the mainland of South 



TREASURY EXTRACTS. 975 

America, and on August 30th dropped anchor off Isabella. 
The colony was demoralized. He sent home many slaves which, 
when Queen Isabella saw, she ordered their instant liberation 
and return. Complaints were made against Columbus; the 
king appointed Francis de Bobadilla on March 21, 1499, to 
proceed to the island of Ilispaniola, examine the condition of 
the colony and suspend the rule of Columbus. On his arrival 
and after examination, Bobadilla put Columbus and his two 
brothers in chains and shipped them off to Spain. Columbus 
would not permit his fetters to be removed during his voyage, 
declaring he would keep them "as relies and as memorials of 
the reward of his services." He wrote a touching letter to the 
queen, which turned the royal favor towards him, and she 
ordered a large sum to defray his expenses and received him 
at court, not in chains but richly apparelled. Their majesties 
repudiated Bobadilla's proceedings, but Columbus was not 
continued as viceroy. He started from Cadiz on another ex- 
pedition May 9, 1502, discovered the Island of Martinique, 
and after much suffering, he ran his ships aground in a small 
inlet called Don Christopher's Cove. From there he sailed 
for Spain and arrived at Seville September 7, 1504. He was 
too ill to go to court, made his will at Valladolid May 19, 1506, 
signed as below, and on the 
following day died. Isabella was - 

dead. A pompous funeral was *0*' 

given him by the king and a ,£". A .0*. 

magnificent monument erected to ~X M* \J 

his memory. His remains were ' ' Jr 

buried at Valladolid, but have — •* / 

been transferred from place to Oj u Q / £*ft£*\/^j\ 
place, and now rest in the cathedral 
at Havana. 

Columbus was tall and stately in person, with a long face, 
aquiline nose, gray eyes, auburn hair and beautiful com- 
plexion. His hair, because of his anxiety and mental 
problems, was gray at thirty. He was most temperate in 
eating and drinking, strict in religious duties, earnest and 
unwavering in his piety and pre-eminently fitted for the task 
he created for himself. 



976 OUR NATIOXAL JUBILEE. 

THOUGHTS PERTINENT TO THE COLUMBIAN 
QUADRENNIAL CELEBRATION. 

[From the various pulpits in New York City. — N. Y. Herald Reports.] 

, From Rev. H. M. Smith, Presbyterian: The elect nations 
of the past had been chosen of God to carry out certain 
purposes of His, as the chosen people of Israel, Babylon, 
Greece and Rome. In later history in Spain, Germany and 
England, each led the other in its own day and thus fulfilled 
the purposes of God. England of late has been the elect 
nation, but now the star of empire is passing westward to 
this land. There is no question but that now and in the 
future this land is to be the elect nation under God for solv- 
ing the problems of liberty, of the amelioration of mankind 
and of the best Christian civilization. 

From Rev. J. Nevitt Steele, D. D., Episcopalian: Among 
the thoughts suggested by this day the first is one of humilia- 
tion. As a people we are disposed to brag and boast and have 
an inordinate confidence in our powers. We are possessed 
with an idea that American ingenuity can accomplish any- 
thing. We regard our own things as far the best in the world, 
our own institutions as the most perfect. But if we come to 
view things with an unprejudiced eye and to pass judgment 
free from self-interest, we must say that, as a rule, our own 
things are not the best, the productions of our skilled labor 
are not always equal to those of older countries. The only 
things we have any shadow of reason to boast of are those 
things the production of which we have nothing to do with, 
namely, those things which are our natural resources and 
are the gift of God. 

From Rev. G. R. Van de Water, Episcopalian: Columbus 
really did more than he intended, for he actually made his 
discovery, which the country is now celebrating, and the 
importance of which Columbus appreciated and spoke of 
when he said: "I've opened a gate by which others may 
entei." And still he died deprived of all except the name 



TREASURY EXTRACTS. 977 

and fame of the New "World. This was the apex of his fame. 
It is nonsense to dwell on the fact that Columbus was a 
Roman Catholic, any more than Presbyterians should glory 
that Washington was a Presbyterian. Columbus lived at a 
time when he was obliged to be a member of the Roman 
Catholic Church, and that is all there is to it. 

From Rev. Dr. Saterlee, Episcopalian: Columbus started 
on his voyage of discovery with God at the helm. Columbus 
was a susceptible man, and imbued with the power of the Holy 
Ghost he started to find a new passage to the Indies with the 
idea of spreading God's Word. 

From Rev. Dr. ./. IT. Brown, Episcopalian: Some writers 
dispute that the honor of the discovery of America was due to 
Columbus, saying that he was never very near Ts'orth America. 
Perhaps as much honor was due to Sebastian Cabot and the 
English government. ' However that might be, by common 
consent nearly every one has agreed in giving honor to the 
names Columbus and Columbia. When Columbus landed he 
invoked the blessings of God, and in the establishment of this 
government the same divine power has been recognized. Could 
any one doubt that these things were providential? It opened 
a country which has been fruitful in the enlargement of the 
Church, in the teaching of the Bible and in bringing people 
of all nations and all beliefs together in the common cause of 
the advancement of civilization. 

From Rev. Dr. Rainsford, Episcopalian: Ours is the last 
experiment among the nations. Other nations may possibly 
arise and mar their future or make it, but it is in no undue 
spirit of self-importance that we say to-day that no other 
nation can arise with so great an inheritance and so great op- 
portunities as the God of Nations has given us. 

Great danger lurks in our country's rapid growth in 
material wealth. The rich are growing richer and the poor 
poorer, and all are selfish. I hope that the problem of our 
civilization may be solved without bloodshed. 



978 OUR NATIONAL Jl'lHLKK. 

From Rev. E. S. Halloway, Baptist: Without a parallel in 

history, the name of Christopher Columbus stands alone, and 
like some great oak towering above the forest trees, so does he 
stand far in advance of his age with a work which is the most 
important since the birth of the Saviour of mankind. And 
I believe that as surely as men have been chosen by God for 
any work, so surely was he the chosen vessel to reveal the 
marvels of a New World to the wondering vision of the Old. 

From Rev. Dr. Rylance, Episcopalian: Many blessings 
and advantages were bequeathed to all nations by the discov- 
eries of the great captain: First, in securing large space for 
the multiplying millions of the Old World; second, in afford- 
ing opportunity for experiments in government, unburdened 
by the evil traditions and prejudices which have so often 
defeated efforts toward political equality; and, third, in liberat- 
ing the world's thought and sympathies by showing how 
men of all creeds and conceits might dwell together in the 
same political household in perfect good will. 

From Rev. W. H. P. Faunce, Baptist: Columbus really 
did hegin the discovery of America, and we are all helping to 
complete the discovery. 

As we re-read the story of Columbus we are perplexed 
beyond measure by the dissolving processes of historical criti- 
cism. Remorseless investigation has broken into a thousand 
pieces the image of Columbus which was the fascination of 
our childhood. While the truth is always welcome we have 
need to beware of the excesses and vagaries of reckless criticism, 
and we cannot put our trust in those whose sole accomplish- 
ment is skill in the arts of disparagement and disdain. Amid 
all disputes one fact no detractor can disguise — Columbus did 
the deed which brought the two continents together, and 
made the life of the East to flow into the lands of the West. 
He thought the " Sea of Darkness" was full of great islands. 
Thus most men go through mire and bog ere they reach the 
bedrock of reality. Men, like horses, must often wear blind- 
ers to keep them going straight forward. Knowledge comes 



TKKASI i;\ i;\Ti: \<TS. D?0 

by sailing out into the sea, and "if any man will do, lie shall 
know." He believed most profoundly in God, in the Bible 
and in Jesus Christ as the incarnate Word. His science and 
his religion were like the right hand and the left. The great- 
est discovery of the ages began in prayer and ended in praise. 
An age that loses its faith in the Unseen will lose all power 
of achievement. It may produce dissectors and parasites; 
it cannot bring forth heroes, martyrs or leaders. Our 
western world was discovered, our civilization founded, our 
institutions created by men who feared God, and therefore 
feared no one else. 

From Rev. J. II. Vandyke, D. />., Presbyterian: T believe 
in giving Columbus full credit for Avhat he did and for what 
good qualities he showed, but I do not think he was either a 
saint or a great genius. In the year 1492 America was still 
undiscovered, although the Norsemen made their way from 
Iceland to Greenland as far back as 876. Their voyages were 
mere coasting expeditions. They did not open the way across 
the western ocean. 

Does it not look as if this Genoese sailor were servant of 
some one greater than himself? Does it not look as if a 
mighty Master guided him and sent him forth on a mission? 
We feel this all the more profoundly when we reflect upon 
the immense and striking contrast between the objects which 
Columbus had in view and the real results of the discovery of 
America. Let us give him honor as a brave and fortunate 
mariner who did his duty according to his lights and was, 
therefore, used to accomplish a great work. But above and 
behind this man let us look up to the Almighty Lord who 
guided him, and praise our God, who alone doeth wonders, y 

From Rev. D. (1. Wylie, Ph. D., Presbyterian: The 
features of Christianity are seen in our constitution and in 
the legislation of the land and in the utterances of our 
Presidents. 

From Per. ('. II. Eaton, Unitarian: Many speak of the 



980 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

life works of the great discoverer and limit them to his going 
west in quest of new lands and the sublime faith and courage 
that he showed. The contributions which Columbus made 
to true religion were not so readily seen. In the discovery of 
a new world a theatre was given for the development and ap- 
plication of religious principles such as the world never knew 
before. The pure religion of modern times originated in 
Europe, but it has only been possible for that religion to find 
its highest and best development under the tolerance of our 
American institutions. In a country where the support of 
religion is voluntary and based upon the sense of personal 
responsibility can alone be found the best expression of the 
religion of Christ. 

From Rev. J. B. Shaw, D. P., Presbyterian: Now, what 
effect has all this upon us as we survey these four hundred 
years of our history to-day? If our natures are at all respon- 
sive it makes us most grateful to Almighty Cod, and our praise 
to Him is loud and full and fervent. It begets within us a 
strong confidence in the future, and that confidence we are 
right in holding if we remember the basis upon which it 
rests. But does it make us boastful or presumptuous? No; 
that would be weakness; that would be sin. It develops a 
deep sense of our dependence upon God, and makes us 
humble, prayerful, and grateful. Thus attributing all of the 
past to Providence let us look trustfully to him for all the 
future. 

From Rev. C H. ParkJmrst, D. P., Presbyterian: The 
three great causes for anxiety for the future on the part of 
the people of the United States are the general lawlessness 
which exists throughout the country, briber} 7 and immigration. 

The lawlessness now prevalent throughout the United 
States generally is something which demands the most serious 
consideration, not only for the moral but the material interests 
of the people. United States government reports show that 
crime is on the increase at an alarmingly rapid rate. 

The subject of the increase in bribery is one of the utmost 



TREASURY EXTRACTS. 981 

importance, for in the existence of corruption among officials 
the impartial administration of justice is impossible, and 
without that the proper enforcement of the law is, of course, 
out of the question, and general lawlessness must follow. 

In the matter of immigration late United States government 
reports show the hand which foreign officials bore in further- 
ing pauper immigration to this country. The governments 
of Europe are using the United States as a dumping ground 
for their own debased populations. 



From Rev. Dr. T. DeWitt Talmage, Presbyterian: What 
most impresses me in all that wondrous life, which for the 
next twelve months we will be commemorating by sermon and 
song and military parade and World's Fair and Congress of 
Nations, is something I have never heard stated, and that is"^- 
that the discovery of America was a religious discovery and 
in the name of God. Columbus by the study of the prophecies 
and by what Zechariah and Micah and David and Isaiah had 
said about the "ends of the earth" was persuaded to go out 
and find the "ends of the earth," and he felt himself called by 
God to carry Christianity to the "ends of the earth." Then 
the administration of the Last Supper before they left the 
Gulf of Cadiz, and the evening prayers during the voyage, 
and the devout ascription as soon as they saw the new world, 
and the doxologics with which they landed, confirm me in 
saying that the discovery of America was a religious discovery. 

Atheism has no right here; infidelity has no right here; 
vagabondism has no right here. And as God is not apt to 
fail in any of His undertakings (at any rate, I have never heard 
of His having anything to do with a failure), America is go- 
ing to be gospelized, and from the Golden Gate of California : 
to the Narrows of New York harbor, and from the top of 
North America to the foot of South America, from Behring 
Straits to Cape Horn, this is going to he Emmanuel's land. 
All the forms of irreligion and abominations that have carsed 
other parts of the world will land here— yea. they have already 
landed— and they will wrangle for the possession of this. 



982 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

hemisphere, and they will make great headway and feel them- 
selves almost established. 

From Rev. Madison Peters, Reformed : AYe are to-day 
treading in the same steps that other historic republics have 
taken and regretted — luxury and extravagance attending 
upon wealth, general laxity in morality and religion, jealousies 
and discontents incident to poverty among the masses, bitter 
conflicts between political parties, abuse heaped upon public 
servants, favors shown to the most dangerous classes when 
they can be used to promote party interests. These were the 
reasons why the historic republics fell into degradation, dis- 
grace and death. The greatest peril threatening our Kepublic 
to-day is promiscuous immigration, and from this giant evil flow 
many perils, chief among which is the wholesale placing of 
the sacred ballot into the hands of those who have as yet done 
nothing entitling them to American citizenship. More than 
one republic has been wrecked on this rock. 



From Rev. Dr. O'Reilly, Roman Catholic: The end of the 
preparatory period of Christianity had come toward the close 
of the fifteenth century. When Columbus touched the shores 
of the Antilles the second period opened. When he first bore 
the cross and planted it on the shores of a new world, there 
began the making of a new home for God's family. 

Shall we while commemorating his unparalleled achieve- 
ments, search out the sins of shortcomings which filled out 
the last years of his life with humiliation, cruel suffering and 
the overflowing cup of bitterness which the ingratitude of 
King and people held to the lips of an impoverished ami feeble 
old man? But it was not Christopher Columbus they degraded. 
His greatness could not be coffined nor confined within prison 
walls. His name shall shine as long as the sun is in the 
firmament. His heroic qualities and Christian virtues will be 
more and more admired and praised with every succeeding 
age. 



FOUR HUNDRED YEARS OF AMERICAN HISTORY 

-WHAT HAS CHRISTIANITY WROUGHT ? 

VIEWS OF EMINENT MEN-* 

FROM JOHN L. WITHROW, D.D., 

PASTOR OF THE THIRD PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH OF 
CHICAGO. 

It has not gained us much as it has given. Christianity 
could have survived and served a noble misson to mankind 
if neither Columbus nor the old Norsemen nor anybody else 
had discovered America. But America having been dis- 
covered, Christianity was the indispensable condition for the 
present development. At least we can no more easily see 
how this side of the earth should have become better than 
Africa on the other side than we can see how Africa will ever 
become equal to America by aid of anything else than the pure 
Gospel of Jesus Christ. It has not been geographic location 
nor ethic inferiority that has held down the dark lands of the 
Orient. Africa has produced some of the giants of bygone 
ages. A continent that led the race in civilization; that filled 
itself with monuments and men at whose feet our latest 
scholarship sits to study; that claims a Hannibal, the highest 
name in war; and an Augustine, Athanasius and Tertullian, 
and their like in the lofty realms of learning, piety and peace; 
such a continent should not need another to be handicapped 
in brain, blood or boundary in order to have for itself an 
even chance in the struggle for supremacy. As it is, Africa 
is only "the dark continent," and its neighbor Asia is not 
much better off. America is only four hundred years old, 
and therefore how youthful compared with the Orient. Hut 
if there had been nothing more than civilization as capital with 
which to work this western hemisphere into State structures, 
we fail to see, rationally, why the New World should by this 
time have been better off than Egypt was when she was of 
our own years. 

*A Symposium from the Christian ;tt Work, 



984 OUll NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Who that traces the operations of our continental progress 
with a candid and scientific spirit can assign any other cause 
that is adequate to the immense and amazing difference 
between ours and the other lands but this holy Christian 
faith? Christianity has given pulse and impulse to all that 
has exalted us. Albeit that the dark ages were upon the 
Christian Church when Columbus and other discoverers 
disclosed this western hemisphere to the world, and of conse- 
quence it was an infected type of Christianity which had sway 
in America for at least a century and a quarter, yet "his seed" 
remained, and in due time it took root and brought forth all 
the most beneficent fruits within our borders. From what 
source did the unparalleled desire for popular education spring? 
From those who planted schoolhouses within sight of the first 
churches. The founders of our earliest universities and the 
supporters of our oldest seminaries were mostly Christian 
ministers, and without notable exception members of Christian 
bodies. During all the centuries that Mohammedanism has 
held such imperious sway in the Turkish Empire it has not 
moved the people to provide so much as an almshouse for the 
helpless poor. 

But Christianity has not only planted poorhouses in every 
considerable community in America; it has dotted the whole 
land and almost crowded the denser districts of cities with 
asylums and comfortable homes for the destitute. The high- 
est court in the United States affirms that Christianity is 
part of the common law. And that is so, because it is the 
best part of our common life. It has heen the defense of the 
family, which is the fountain of national life; and of the 
Sabbath day, the beneficent institution which not only pro- 
vides refuge and rest for the weary burden-bearers, but also 
offers resistance to the avarice which in Sabbathless lands 
"eateth up the inhabitants thereof." And so it should be 
said first that Christianity has given more than it has gained 
by the four hundred years of American history. 

Meanwhile it has made gains of greatest importance. It 
had the advantage at the beginning of starting in an open 
country. It was not confronted with hoary faiths as it was 



VIEWS— EEV. JOHN L. WITHROW. 985 

when the early Church of Christ was established in Asia and 
Europe. There was no struggle needed to secure entrance 
into this new Canaan. No Sanhedrin of Jewish rulers nor 
pantheon of pagan gods disputed the right of Christian teachers 
to train the people with Gospel truth. And then being 
admitted freely, Christianity in America has had its chief 
chance to exercise the largest liberty of search and speech and 
experiment. Of course there has been some intolerance of 
opinion, but hardly more than has been of abuse of sacred 
obligation. Resistance has been made where search and 
speech have indicated a rebellious spirit in those who voluntarily 
vowed to live in good fellowship with a particular body of 
Christians. But rarely has any one eager to search for 
truth and moved to speak his mind been harmed or hindered 
where he has ( as we say) " hired a hall." By this circumstance 
Christianity has gained immensely in America, particularly 
in the United States. In my boyhood I heard the then illus- 
trious Robert J. Breckinridge of Kentucky make a tart and 
telling remark to a fierce opponent on the floor of the General 
Assembly. The gentleman had become too hot to confine 
himself to argument and had turned to bitter denunciation. 
Being called to order by the chair, old Dr. Breckinridge, the 
man's antagonist, quietly said " Let him go on!" "Spit it 
out!" ''He will feel better, and it don't hurt mo." 

It has been the prevailing spirit in America that if any one 
is at enmity with the institutions and teachings of Christianity 
let him say on — spit it out. Then if what he says is worth 
considering, as oftentimes it has been, and worth applying, 
freemen do not fear to make an experiment. Christianity 
is not a plant that flourishes best in the shade. It needs all 
the sunlight and air of the open heavens, and in America 
more than elsewhere it has enjoyed these. 

It has also gained by the youthful and aggressive spirit 
which has developed the material resources of the continent, 
especially of this country, with the swiftness of a magician's 
movement. The Church has had to keep up with the quick 
step of trade. "Witness what the Sunday-school and in 
general the young people's church work in Germany, France 



980 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

or England is as compared with the same in America. There 
everything is slow, and the church movement of course. But 
here the pulse of progress beats so strong and swift in material 
and social life that Christianity catches the temper, quickens 
its pace, and so stands before mankind as the most enterpris- 
ing and promising part of all the King's dominions. And 
as the only evidence we have space to offer for this (and that 
should be sufficient), the very "little flock"of Christ's followers 
at first has grown to over twenty millions of church members 
in our population of sixty-three millions, and the additions 
to the Christian churches are coming more rapidly than babies 
into our cradles. 



FROM FRANK RUSSELL, D. D., 

FIELD SECRETARY OF THE EVANGELICAL ALLIANCE. 

The changes wrought by its light and heat best testify of 
the sun. The Sun of Righteousness marks his way by the 
changes and growths in humanity on which he shines. In a 
sense material progress is now Christian progress — there is 
no secular. We may study progress through some contrasts. 

At the time of the discovery of America feudalism was 
nourishing even in England; Savonarola was shattering the 
corruptions of the Medici in Italy; Scotland had barely begun 
to build universities. Ingenuity had experimented a little 
with watches, but in more than a half century after, 1492, 
the smallest product was six inches in diameter and cost as 
much as an average farm ; stoves waited un til after our Revolu- 
tion; coal a little longer; matches until 1830; sewing 
machines until 184G; the United States Mint until three 
hundred years after the discovery; mowers and reapers were 
known from the days of the Apostles, but waited for McCor- 
mick and Hussey to launch them upon the oceans of American 
harvests in the first quarter of the American century. After 
waiting three hundred years steam navigation came but 
required nearly two months to cross the Atlantic, while now 
the ocean has shrunken to a five-day ferry, hastening the 



Views— rev. frank russell. i>87 

time when "there shall be no more sea." We have had a 
little more than a half century of railway building and now 
our maps are like pictures of fishnets spread for drying, and 
the track on the average adds ten dollars an acre to the 
value of land within ten miles of it. Printing was nearly 
synchronous with the discovery. The block system had 
printed first packs of playing cards and then a portion of the 
Bible. Of the first four books printed at Mayence two were 
Bibles, one a Psalter, and the fourth a Cicero. The great 
English book was not thirty years old, and all the globe had 
not four hundred printed books in 1492. 

It was thirty-two years before there was a postroad, and 
that from London to Edinburgh, established by James I., 
with six days for the round trip, and the first weekly post- 
route was in 1044:. It was nearly a century before there was 
a postoffice, and only until about fifty years ago that a Gospel 
minister secured the penny postage. 

The first newspaper was in England in L622; the first daily 
in 1702; the first American newspaper was in 1690, and was 
suppressed; the people waited until 1104 before they could 
have a newspaper, and until 1730 before the manufacture of 
paper became an infant industry. 

Our postoffice struggled into existence between 1692 and 
1710, but a hundred years more counted only seventy-five of 
them. Now in all our land our people can read every morn- 
ing what took place the day before in all the capitals of the 
globe. 

The discovery was nearly synchronous with the Reformation. 
Wicliff had been gone from the earth a little more than a 
hundred years; Chaucer was in Wicliff's time; John IIuss had 
beeu burned seventy-seven years; Luther was nine years old 
and Zwingli eight; Loyola was just born and Calvin in seven- 
teen years after; in eighty years more was John Knox, con- 
temporary with Galileo, Shakespeare and Bacon. The 
Spanish Inquisition was not twenty years old, but had put 
over thirty thousand to death for their faith, and it was one 
hundred and twenty-nine years after the discovery when King 
James 1 version came. Some indirect advancement. 



988 OUR NATIONAL JUBTLEE. 

Civilization also, like the sun, lias been shining from the 
East until now there is no more unenlightened West. The 
civilization of America was not to be by the greedy Spaniards. 
The Christian Huguenots were to find a refuge, and besides 
a refuge the Pilgrim Fathers were to find a place to build 
a Christian civilization. This entered strongly into all their 
hopes, and it has been realized. 

The attitude of nations towards each other has been greatly 
changed through the development of Christian ideas. Until 
recently the property of citizens of belligerent nations was not 
anywhere secure, but was held as open spoil for the enemy. 
Even during our Civil War Congress voted to grant letters 
of marque and reprisal. Happily none were granted. The 
term " privateering" must be explained to our children. In the 
German and French war, when the latter expected privateering, 
Emperor William sent forth the memorable utterance that 
the German forces should fight French soldiers, but not 
French citizens. Hospitals and ambulances with their men 
and appliances were once the cruel prey of the enemy, but are 
now inviolably neutral, and prisoners once the objects of 
torture when taken, are now safe from harm in the hands of 
an enemy. 

Great armaments still menace the nations of Europe, but 
it is broadly discussed what our nations has demonstrated, 
that a militia is a more effective force than a standing army. 
It is thought by many seers thatlifter our Columbian Exposi- 
tion wars will be very difficult to start. 

Peace organizations, arbitration and mediation, vast im- 
provements in penology, great growths of great charities and 
their multiplication, the Christian element increasing in 
literature, the growth of the press and its full and fair treat- 
ment of matters from a Christian view, and the fact that the 
satanic press has become far less satanic, testify to the gain 
of Christianity in our land and in the world. But there are 
many evidences of more direct advancement. 

For more than fifty years after the discovery of America 
there was no public Christian worship excepting in the Latin 
tongue. The people could not read and had nothing to read. 



VIEWS— URV. KRAXIv RUSSELL. 989 

The common worshipper had not learned that the priest was 
not a requisite in personal devotions. With Elizabeth came 
the vernacular in worship and the book of common prayer. 
But as individual thought gained freedom, everything anti- 
Christian seemed also to take on new powers, and the forces 
against Christianity seem to parallel its strides. During its 
latest and largest growth infidelity in all its forms is mighty. 
Spiritualism, Mormonism, Socialism, the rum power, political 
and municipal corruption and the worship of mammon threaten 
to wreck humanity. Prisons with all their increase are over- 
crowded. Unrestrained immigration adds to the terror. Three 
murders on the average in our land are committed every two 
hours, and a ridiculously small number of murderers are 
punished. The picture is dark enough, but all the darker be- 
cause of the contrast with the light. 

There were only fourteen foreign missions and no home 
missions until this century, now there are two hundred and 
sixty-four of both. Fourteen before this century, sixty-five 
the first half of the century, and one hundred and eighty- 
five (over seventy per cent.) since 1850. There were scarcely 
any missionary societies in the United States until 1800, now 
there are seventy-six. Seventeen were formed before 1850, 
and fifty-nine (seventy-seven per cent, of them) since 1850. 
In every one of the past few decades the receipts for foreign 
missions have nearly doubled, and for home missions more 
than doubled. During each of a number of decades the 
receipts of denominational publishing houses have nearly 
doubled. Denominational colleges have more than three 
times the property held by other colleges, and have nearly 
four-fifths of the students. The per cent, of Christian students 
has nearly doubled during the last fifty years. We are wit- 
nessing the downfall of the hyperisms in theology; the hurt- 
ful and hindering features of denominationalism are fading 
away. The Young Men's Christian Associations, the develop- 
ment of wondrous activity, the rise of the Christian Endeavor 
and similar growths of church power mark the great progress 
of Christianity. Some have feared the relative increaseof the 
Roman Catholic membership, but since 1880 there has been 



990 OUR NATIONAL JUMLEE. 

a relative decrease. The power of pastors has waned, but only 
the priestly power. As leaders of their fellows in Christian 
activity in the application of the Gospel to humanity, the 
power of pastors is certainly increasing. Intemperance is 
becoming more unpopular. Sociology is becoming Christian- 
ized. The churches are becoming freer and more adapted to 
the needs of the people. They are also increasing amazingly. 
As many churches have been built in the United States since 
1870 as were in existence at that time. The per cent, of 
communicants to the population has steadily increased; in 
1800, one in fourteen; in 1850, one in seven, in 1870, one in 
six; in 1880 one in five; in 1890, one in four. Surely "the 
mountain of the house of the Lord shall be established upon 
the tops of the mountains, and be exalted above the hills, and. 
the people shall flow into it." 



FROM CHARLES L. THOMPSON, D.D., 

PASTOR OF THE MADISON AVENUE PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, 
NEW YORK. 

The picture of those years can be painted only on the 
background of the world's condition at the close of the fif- 
teenth century. There is not space here to paint that picture, 
but only to indicate in large outline what it might contain. 

Popular government in the present sense of the word was 
scarcely known when Columbus steered for a new world. 
Venice and the Italian States were oligarchies, ruled by igno- 
rance, ambition and subtle crimes. Geneva and the Swiss Can- 
tons could scarce be called governments. A few brave hearts 
there were dreaming dreams of liberty which could be realized 
only in the narrowest sense. Florence in the time of Savonarola 
and under the Medicis was the nearest approach to republican 
government. But Lorenzo stole the rights and liberties of his 
people, and when the great preacher demanded as a condition 
of absolution that the dying Prince should restore the liberties 
he had taken away, he turned on his bed and died without 
meeting the condition. England Avas a second or third rate 



\ii:ws— rf.V. TALBOT W. CHAMBERS. !»!ll 

power, with a population of only a few millions; a land of 
turbulent nobles, of internal strife, of opulent merchants and 
oppressed people. Spain was powerful, luxurious, arrogant, 
corrupt and despotic. There was not anywhere in Europe a 
secure home for liberty. The discovery of America was the 
discovery of tbat home. 

Again, there was no popular education at the close of the 
fifteenth century. The mind of Europe was waking to certain 
forms of scholarship. For the most part pedantry passed for 
learning, and ecclesiastical power held the 'key to the philo- 
sophical and theological subtleties which passed for scholarship. 
Columbus discovered popular education. Our system of free 
schools is his most significant monument. In his path count- 
less blessings have come to us. 

Again, Columbus discovered religious freedom and progress. 
Himself a Catholic and his country Catholic, he opened the 
home of freedom, of conscience for liberty, of religious investi- 
gation, and for the advance of practical religion throughout 
the world. America was first a religious refuge. It is now 
the most conspicuous arena of religious progress both in 
thought and missions. The largeness of our country is 
reflected in a certain noble breadth in the religious thinking 
that prevails here, and the impulse of free institutions has its 
best illustration in the force and spirit with which American 
Christianity is moving out across the world. It moves like 
daylight, with an expansive power that already has touched 
on nearly every shore. Ah! could Columbus have seen in 
one glimpse the grandeur of the inheritance he gave mankind, 
he would have died under the insupportable ecstasy of the 
vision. 



FROM TALBOT. W. CHAMBERS, D.D., 

PASTOR OF THE MIDDLE COLLEGIATE REFOBMED CHURCH, 
NEW YORK. 

It does not seem to me that much has been gained in the 
way of formulating doctrine. Much was done in this respect 



992 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

in Europe in the first half of the sixteenth century, when 
soteriology was fully developed, but America had no hand in 
this. Nor did the vexed questions of Polity receive any special 
illumination from American pens, and the same is true in 
regard to Ritual. In all these we have been receivers, not 
givers. 

It is quite otherwise in respect to the connection of Church 
and State. The truth on this important matter has been 
ascertained and established as it never was before or else- 
where. At the beginning, when America was discovered and 
for a long period afterward, it was firmly held thatcujus regio 
ejus religio was the proper rule, and this was accepted and 
acted upon in every colony on the Atlantic seaboard. This 
was considered to be advantageous both to the State and tbe 
Church. There was always a considerable degree of toleration 
for dissidents, but only one particular mode of faith and worship 
had the sanction and the support of the civil authorities. 
And even wise and learned men doubted whether any other 
course could with safety be adopted. The question was 
wrought out very fully and in a variety of forms in our 
country, and so successfully that the word " toleration" has 
been banished from the discussion. Every man believes and 
worships as he pleases — and this not as an indulgence which 
may be withdrawn, but as a personal right which is strictly 
inalienable. Hence Church and State are entirely separated 
and distinct. And experience has shown that no harm but 
rather benefit accrues to either from the separation. The 
Church left to itself molds its own organization and provides 
for its own support and extension. The State, freed from any 
concern in ecclesiastical matters, proceeds on its way receiving 
as a voluntary gift that support which any form of Christianity 
always renders to law and order. The result is freedom from 
all clashing, and a degree of peace and prosperity rarely seen 
under other circumstances. This result as affects the Church 
has always been a surprise to those who have lived under a 
State religion. The voluntary principle has proved equal to 
all emergencies. The people have rallied to the support of 
their religious leaders, and contributed so largely to the 



VIEWS— JAMES M. WI1ITOX, I'll. I). 99i» 

maintenance of churches, ministers, and institutions thai it 
is doubtful if any other country in the world is so well supplied 
with the means of grace and culture. Christianity, therefore, 
has gained through American history a demonstration of the 
great truth that the Church does not need an alliance with 
the State in order to secure its permanence and growth, but 
on the contrary succeeds better when left to itself. The 
census of 1890 shows the existence of about one hundred and 
fifty religious bodies in the United States, but their number 
and variety awakens no discord. Each of the leading divisions 
contributes what is lacking in the others, and all taken 
together supply the needs of the nation, and are a sure defense 
against the inroads of ignorance, superstition, and fanaticism. 
Kevivals of religion, voluntary associations, humanitarian 
influences, and the use of laymen in evangelistic work, have 
often been mentioned as distinctive features of American 
Christianity but there is no basis for the claim. All these have 
been found elsewhere and in former ages of the Church, and 
are in no respect peculiar to the soil of this continent. It is 
enough for us to have worked out the problem of a free Church 
in a free State, not in theory or on paper, but in the actual 
experience of life, and that in opposition to the practice of 
a thousand years. This has been done on so broad a scale, in 
such a variety of social conditions and in the face of such a 
strong tradition to the contrary, that it will never need to be 
done over. It stands, and will stand, as a beacon light to all 
Christians throughout tbe world. 



FROM JAMES M. WHITON. TIED. 

The advantage gained for Christianity by the discovery 
of America was a virgin world to which the best and mosl 
fruitful germs of progress that had been quickened in the 
Old World might be transplanted to grow in freedom from 
overshadowing interferences. First of these was the voluntary 
church of primitive Christianity, free from corrupting alli- 
ance with civil governments. Of this Christianity has realized 
a vast and beneficent development in America. .Next the 



994 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Biblical principle, so effectively emphasized in narrow limits 
by European Oalvinists, of the equal worth and dignity of man 
as man, has been developed more widely than elsewhere in 
the world by the democratizing of society — a result which 
steadily enures to the promotion of that practical Christianity 
which is in justice and mercy and freedom to all righteous- 
ness. Next, Christianity has gained much actually and more 
in promise by the rising to the rank of a first-class power among 
the jealous and warlike nations of the great Republic whose 
ideals are pacific, whose ambitions are unwarlike, whose policy 
is to institute arbitration for the sword. Lastly, one may 
mention the increasing devotion of private wealth on a scale 
which already excites the attention and admiration of the 
world to the endowment of those educational institutions 
which are to Christianity indispensable. 



FROM REV. JOHN L. SCTJDDER, 

PASTOR OF THE PEOPLE'S TABERNACLE, JERSEY CITY, N. J. 

The discovery of America has been one of the prominent 
factors in modern progress, and stands side by side with such 
transforming agencies as the printing-press, gunpowder, steam 
and electricity. Under the inspiration of these novel forces, 
with a mighty continent for their development, civilization 
has advanced during the past 400 years as never before 
in the history of the globe. In fact, since Columbus set 
his face to the West the world has been revolutionized, 
and Christianity, like everything else, has been vastly im- 
proved. America gave the iconoclastic and progressive ele- 
ments of the Old World an opportunity for expansion, a field 
for the development of new ideas. In this land time-honored 
restraints were removed and freedom had unlimited sway. 
In the natural recoil from oppressive authority men began to 
think for themselves, and gradually reason took the place of 
tradition, and superstition gave way to science. This was a 
great gain to Christianity, and with it came new life and 
fervor. Piety became more vital and spontaneous, and church 



VIEWS— REV. ROBERT F. SAMPLE. '.l!l,"> 

membership rapidly increased. Although latterly long-cher- 
ished dogmas have died, personal godliness is gaining ground, 
and the essential principles of Christianity are in fusing them- 
selves into the people at large. While theology wanes, 
anthropology waxes. With increasing intelligence has come 
a hetter public sentiment. Although ecclesiasticism is losing- 
strength, Christlikeness, is becoming more potent and perva- 
sive. Society will no longer tolerate slavery or duelling, and 
even cruelty to animals meets with punishment. Drinking is 
less bestial, debauchery less open, the drama less sensual, and 
refinement more widely diffused. Much Christianity exists 
outside of the churches, which manifests itself in sympathy 
and benevolence for the oppressed and strives to ameliorate 
the condition of the unfortunate. The asperities of business 
life are being softened and the industrial world is gradually 
approaching the law of love. The Church is interested in 
social problems as never before, and there is a growing demand 
for the industrial rights of the working classes. Religion is 
becoming more practical and is willing to devote more thought. 
to the life that now is and the multifarious needs of humanity. 
The salvation of men is becoming a scientific study, involving 
the principles of heredity, environment, education and kin- 
dred influences that determine human character. The exces- 
sive deuominationalism of the recent past is dying out, ami 
from all branches of the Protestant Church come cries for 
closer union. "Amo" has taken the place of "credo," and 
there is a growing disposition to bring all Christian people 
upon the simple but sufficient platform enunciated by Jesus 
Christ, which is love to God and man. In other words 
American Christianity is becoming cosmopolitan in character 
and is destined to rule the world. 



FROM ROBERT K. SAMPLE, D.D. 

PASTOR OF THE WESTMINSTER PRESBYTERIAN CHURCH, 
KKW YORK. 

It is a signicfiant fact that when Martin Luther was nailing 

his theses on the church door in Wittenberg, and a resuscitated 



\)% OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Christianity was taking its exodus from a corrupt Church, 
that America was being prepared as an asylum for the exiled 
saints. The sailor of Genoa, finding a continent in the midst 
of what had been an interminable main, claimed it for Christ, 
and wrote San Salvador over its gateway, that all subsequent 
voyagers might learn its dedication to the Prince of Peace. 
Romanism, through the agency of Columbus, and Roman 
Catholic Spain, unwittingly defeated its own efforts to crush 
the Reformation in its cradle, and helped to transfer it to a 
larger nursery and the freer air of a western land, separated 
from the scenes of prosecution by a wilderness of waves. 

The advance during the four centuries that followed of a 
pure Christianity, and the growth of a liberated Church, have 
been the wonder of the latter ages. The faith in Christ as a 
Redeemer of men and the Lord of conscience that brought 
pious emigrants hither to plant their sanctuaries in the shade 
of primeval forests, and the consecrated energy which kindled 
the altar fires of a Scriptural religion on the margin of a 
New World, pushed out the boundary lines of the Church, 
until in our day we see the light of Divine truth shining 
over the vast spaces which lie between the Northern Lakes 
and the Southern Gulf, and all the way from the Atlantic " to 
the continuous wood where rolls the Oregon." 

The emigrants from the Old World were chiefly Protestants. 
Only one Roman Catholic colony, that of Maryland, repre- 
sented the Papacy on this side of the water, and that, with its 
Protestant environment, soon lost its distinctive character. 
Meanwhile the Puritans and Huguenots, the Dutch, and pious 
Scotch, and the' loyal followers of John Wesley, in a continu- 
ous succession were building up American colonies, fighting 
the battles of Independence, forming a government whose 
principles are the perfection of human wisdom, and es- 
tablishing in this great empire of the West the purest 
religion known to our race, and the freest, most spir- 
itual, most potential ecclesiasticism beneath the sun. 
In no land is the inspired Word of God so honored, 
the Lord's Day so sacredly observed, the House of God so 
reverenced, and the principles of Christianity so dominant as. 



v ii:\vs—ephku whitaker. 997 

in ours. Hero we have the finest illustration of the relation 
of Bible religion to national freedom, of the faith once 
delivered to the saints to a happy domesticity, of the story of 
Jesus and his love to the purest philanthropy, the broadest 
charity, the happiest brotherhood, and the sweetest social 
amenities on which the sun in its long circuit has ever shone. 
The conservation of our holy faith and its continuance down 
to the last setting sun, beyond it the new heavens and the 
new earth wherein dwelleth righteousness, is a duty of the 
present generation, and will be that of the generations to 
come, each in its time cherishing the hope which inspired the 
breast of Henry Clay when, in the early part of the nineteenth 
century, standing in meditative mood at his tent door on the 
summit of the Alleghanies, he said, "lam listening to the 
tread of millions going West." 



FKOM EPHEE WHITAKER, D.D., 

PASTOR OF PRESBYTERIAN" CHURCH, SOUTHOLD, L. I. 

The question has been asked what has Christianity gained 
by the four hundred years of American History since Columbus 
first saw a small island on the west side of the Atlantic? The 
first word of this question covers a large and various field. 
The gain has been manifold; one may see it in the external 
conquests and the territorial acquisitions of Christianity. The 
gain is felt in the inward purification and increasing sanctity 
of the Church — the growth of holy character in the Body of 
Christ. It is most remarkable perhaps in the generous 
activities which disclose the loving heart and the beneficent 
purposes of the Bride of Christ; in the institutions of Charity; 
in care and provision for all kinds of unfortunates and suf- 
ferers, hospitals, asylums, orphanages, and places of rest and 
peace for aged and helpless persons. The gain is also greatly 
and gratefully conspicuous in the better system of the truth 
divinely given, faithfully received, cordially cherished, 
intelligently taught, and widely spread among Christian 
peoples. 



098 OUE NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

In all these points the Christian gain during the four 
hundred years has been remarkable; and in some particulars 
the progress has been measureless. 

1. American history in four hundred years has given to 
Christianity a continent of peerless excellence. It extends 
from the frosty regions of Patagonia to the perpetual ice of 
the shores of the Arctic. It is the continent of " the Eternal 
Womanly." Its very shape and structure indicate this 
characteristic. And if its youthful, virgin history of four 
centuries only has done so much to uplift the sex which is 
specially allied to the gentle virtues and the affectionate graces 
wherein the religion of Christ delights, desirable foundations 
are laid for ampler gains to accrue in the rich, womanly, 
maturer history of the continent. The continent, as the field 
for a higher civilization; a freer, holier Church; a wiser, purer 
civil government, without the embarrassment of old, unjust, 
unequal, and hateful prescriptions and institutions — this 
continent which American history has given to Christianity 
in four hundred years, is an immense gain. 

2. American history in four hundred years has conferred a 
priceless boon on Christianity by producing here a far holier 
Church than could be seen anywhere else since the days of 
the Apostles. This is not the mark of the present Church in 
all parts of the continent; but it is in the parts which are 
dominant and emphatically American. Our own country 
excels all others in the holiness of the ministry and the 
membership of the Church. This is under God a fruit of 
American history. 

3. The Christian devotion which conveys the blessings of 
Christianity to heathendom, is the same power that builds 
the institutions of Christian benevolence in all the better 
lands of the earth. There Avere here and there establish- 
ments of this character four hundred years since; but they 
were few, inadequate, and in a degree for the most part lack- 
ing in fitness for their purpose. American history has been 
efficient not only in greatly increasing their number, but also 
in the improvement of their adaptation to their high and noble 
ends. 



VIEWS— REV. WILBUR F. ('RAFTS. 999 

4. The earth is the same globe which Columbus studied, 
and on whose waters he sailed; but the truths which it teaches 
are not in the same systems that men then made, accepted and 
used. The Book of the Christian religion is the same divine 
revelation which Jerome translated, Augustine expounded, 
and Tauler preached. But the systems which men now form, 
in order that the truths of the Revelation may he readily 
perceived, clearly taught, and permanently remembered, are 
not the same systems that were in use four hundred years ago. 
Any Christian man can now use a better system of Christian 
truth than any man' could find on earth when Columbus first 
crossed the sea. American history has given to Christianity 
not a small part of this gain. 



FROM REV. WILBUR F. CRAFTS, 

EDITOR CHRISTIAN STATESMAN, PITTSBURGH, PA. 

Christianity has gained by the four hundred years of 
American history chiefly in three respects: 1. In the 
strengthening of Protestantism. 2. In the development of 
spiritual religion by separating it from the State. :>. In the 
application of Christ ianity to morality. One who looks at the 
map of North America two hundred years after its discovery by 
Columbus sees a few Prostestant colonies on the Atlantic 
coast, with Catholics to north of them, Catholics to west of 
them, Catholics to south of them. Paint Catholic terri- 
tory black on your map and Protestant brown, and you 
will see a morsel in a vast black mouth that seems 
about to swallow it. A wonderful Providence prevented 
North America from becoming what South America is, illit- 
erate, vicious, childish. Protestantism in Europe having only 
Germany, Holland and Great Britain, needed another great 
nation to keep up its balance of power and save it from over- 
throw by the Catholic countries. But Protestantism especially 
needed the American churches to show how much more spir- 
itual and how much more active and forceful in moral reforms 
the Churches becomes when it asserts its independence of the 



1000 OUIt NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

State and refuses to make its pulpits political offices. Ameri- 
can Christianity is half a century ahead of the German State 
Church in temperance and Sabbath keeping and purity, and a 
quarter of a century ahead of the British State Church in these 
and other moral reforms. It seems as if God had hid away this 
continent until the Eeformation was about to break on the 
world to give it one fair field for spiritual and moral applica- 
tion. 



FROM RUSSEL H. CONWELL, 

PASTOR OF THE GRACE BAPTIST CHURCH, PHILADELPHIA. 

The world has gained far more from the study of Colum- 
bus's noble Christian character than has been estimated. His 
great achievement has called attention to his personal faith in 
God and to his private acts of kindness so distinctly that they 
have inspired a myriad acts of charity, deeds of benevolence 
and Christian statesmanship. Columbus did far more than to 
discover a continent. 



DISCOVEKY DAY- 
PRESIDENT HARRISON'S PROCLAMATION 

RECOMENDING THE OBSERVANCE OF FRIDAY, OCTOBER 21, 

1892, AS THE FOUR HUNDRETH ANNIVERSARY OF THE 

DISCOVERY OF AMERICA. 

Whereas, by a joint resolution approved June 20, 18!»2, 
it was resolved by tbe Senate and House of Representatives 
of the United States of America in Congress assembled, " That 
the President of the United States be authorized and directed 
to issue a proclamation recommending to the people the 
observance in all their localities of the four hundredth anni- 
versary of the discovery of America, on October 21, 1892, by 
public demonstration and by suitable exercises in their schools 
and other places of assembly : " 

Now therefore I, Benjamin Harrison, President of the 
United States of America, in pursuance of the aforesaid joint 
resolution, do hereby appoint Friday, October 21, 1892, the 
four hundredth anniversary of the discovery of America by 
Columbus, as a general holiday for the people of the United 
States. On that day let the people, so far as possible, cease 
from toil, and devote themselves to such exercises as may 
best express honor to the discoverer and their appreciation of 
the great achievements of the four completed centuries of 
American life. 

Columbus stood in his age as the pioneer of progress and 
enlightenment. The system of universal education in our age 
is the most prominent and salutary feature of the spirit of 
enlightenment, and it is peculiarly appropriate that the schools 
be made by the people the centre of the day's demonstration. 
Let the national flag float over every school-house in the 
country, and the exercises be such as shall impress upon our 
youth the patriotic details of American citizenship. 

In the churches and in the other places of assembly of the 
people let there be expressions of gratitude to Divine Provi- 



3002 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

deuce for the devout faith of the discoverer, and for the Diviue 
care and guidance which has directed our history and so 
abundantly blessed our people. 

In testimony whereof I have hereunto set my hand and 
caused the seal of the United States to be affixed. 

Done at the city of Washington this 21st day of July, in 
the year of our Lord one thousand eight hundred and ninety- 
two, and of the Independence of the United States the one 
hundred and seventeenth. 

By the President : Benj. Harrison. 

John W. Foster, Secretary of State. 






DEDICATION OF THE WOELD'S FAIR BUILDINGS- 
EXTENDING THE FREEDOM OF THE 
CITY TO ITS GUESTS. 

AN ADDRESS BY MAYOR HEMPSTEAD WASH- 
BUKNE, OF CHICAGO. 

Mr. President, Representatives of Foreign Govern- 
ments, Ladies and Gentlemen: 

This day is dedicated by the American people to one whose 
name is indissolubly linked with that of our continent. This 
clay shall add new glories to him whose prophetic vision beheld 
in the stars which guided his audacious voyage a new world 
and a new hope for the people of the earth. 

The four centuries passing in review have witnessed the 
settlement of a newly discovered continent, the founding of 
many nations, and the establishment in this country of more 
than sixty millions of people whose wonderful material pros- 
perity, high intelligence, political institutions and glorious 
history have excited the interest and compelled the admiration 
of the civilized world. 

These centuries have evolved the liberty-loving American 
people who are gathered here to-day. We have with us the 
pioneer bearing in his person the freedom of his Western 
home — the aging veteran, whom all nations honor, without 
whose valor, government, liberty and patriotism would be hut 
idle words. We have with us builders of cities, founders of 
States, dwellers in the forests, tillers of the soil, the mechanic 
and the artisan, and noble women, daughters of the Republic, 
not less in patriotism and deserved esteem than those who 
seem to play the larger part in building up a State. 

There are gathered here our President and stately Senate, 
our grave and learned judges, our Congress and our States 
that all mankind may know this is a Nation's holiday and a 
people's tribute to him whose dauntless courage and unwaver- 
ing faith impelled him to traverse undismayed the unsailed 
waste of waters, and whose first prayer upon a waiting con- 



1004 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

tinent was saluted on its course by that banner which knows 
no creed, no faith, no nation — that ensign which has 
represented peace, progress and humanity for 1,900 years — ■ 
the holy banner of the cross. 

Those foreign nations which have contributed so much to 
our growth will here learn wherein our strength lies — that 
it is not in standing armies — not in heredity or birth — not 
even in our fertile valleys — not in our commerce nor our 
wealth — but that we have built and are building upon the 
everlasting rock of individual character and intelligence, seek- 
ing to secure an education for every man, woman and child 
over whom floats the stars and stripes, that emblem which 
signifies our Government and our people. 

That flag guards to-day 21,500,000 school children of a 
country not' yet four centuries old, and who outnumber 
nearly four times the population of Spain in 1492. 

This is our hope in the future — the anchor of the Republic 
— and a rainbow of promise for the centuries yet to come. 

As a mark of public gratitude it was decided to carry down 
into history through this celebration the appreciation of this 
people for him before whose name we all bow to-day. 

You, sirs, who are the chosen representatives of our people — 
you into whose keeping we intrust our property and our 
rights — you whose every act becomes a link in that long 
chain of history which spans 400 years without a break and 
whose every link signifies a struggle and victory for man — 
you who represent that last and most perfect experiment of 
human government, have by your official acts honored this 
young city with your choice as the most fitting place to mark 
this country's dawn. 

She accepts the sacred trust with rivalry toward none and 
fellowship for all. She stands ready to fulfill the pledges she 
has made. She needs no orator to speak her merits, no poet 
to sing her glories. She typifies the civilization of this con- 
tinent and this age; she has no hoary locks; no crumbling 
ruins; the grayhaired sire who saw her birth to-day holds on 
high his prattling grandchild to see the nations of the earth 
within her gates. 






ADDRESS— MAYOR WASHBURNE 1005 

This, sirs, is the American city of your choice: her gates 
are open, her people at your service. To you and those you 
represent we offer greeting, hospitality aud love. 

To the Old World whose representatives grace this occasion, 
whose governments are in- full accord with this enterprise so 
full of meaning to them and to us, to that Old World whose 
children braved unruly seas and treacherous storms to found 
a new state in an unknown land, we give greeting too, as 
children greet a parent in some new home. 

We are proud of its ancestry, for it is our own. We glory 
in its history, for it was our ancestral hlood which inscribed 
its rolls of honor, and if to-day these distinguished men of 
more distinguished lands behold any spirit, thing or ambition 
which excites their praise, it is but the outcropping of the 
Eoman courage on a new continent in a later age. 

AVelcome to you men of older civilizations to this young 
city whose most ancient landmark was built within the span 
of a present life. Our hospitalities and our welcome we now 
extend without reserve, without regard to nationality, creed 
or race. 



THE GKEAT AIM OF THE COLUMBIAN EXHIBTION. 

AN ADDEESS BY T. W. PALMER, PRESIDENT OF 
THE WORLD'S COLUMBIAN EXHIBITION. 

When a structure designed for a beneficent purpose has 
reached completion and is about to be devoted to its object it 
is deemed fitting, in accordance with a custom which sprang 
from the aspirations of man, and which has received the 
sanction of successive generations that its intent and aim shall 
be declared amid imposing ceremonies, and the good-will of 
the present and the blessing of the future invoked about it. 

If this occasion shall have, as one of its results, the 
inauguration of another festal day to enlarge the too meagre 
calendar of our people, the world will be richer thereby, and 
a name which has been hitherto held in vague and careless 
remembrance will be made a vital and elevating force to 
mankind. 

Hitherto the work of the National Commission and of the 
Exposition Company has been on different but convergent 
lines; to-day the roads unite, and it may not be amiss at this 
time to speak of the work already done. Two years ago the 
ground on which we stand was a dreary waste of sand dunes 
and quagmires, a home for wild fowl and aquatic plants. 
Under skilled artists, supplemented by intelligence, force, 
industry and money, this waste has been changed by the magic 
hand of labor to its present attractive proportions. I do not 
speak of this work as an artist, but as one of the great body 
of laymen whom it is the high calling of art to uplift. To me 
it seems that, if these buildings should never be occupied, if 
the exhibits should never come to attract and educate, if our 
people could only look upon these walls, towers, avenues and 
lagoons, a result would be accomplished by the influence 
diffused well worth all the cost. 

It was an act of high intelligence which, in the beginning, 
called a congress of the most eminent of our architects for 
consultation and concerted action. No one brain could have. 



ADDRESS— T. W. PALMER. 10()7 

conceived this dream of beauty, or lured from fancy and crys- 
talized in form these habitations where art will love to linger, 
and science, Cornelia-like, shall expose her children to those 
who ask to see her jewels. 

Of the commission and its agencies, its Director-Generals 
and the heads of its departments, its agents and envoys, I, 
although a part of that National organization, may be per- 
mitted to speak. Called together by the President two years 
ago, its organic law difficult of construction, with room for 
honest and yet contradictory opinions, it has striven honestly, 
patriotically and diligently to do its whole duty. Through 
its agencies it has reached to the uttermost parts of the earth 
to gather in all that could contribute to make this not only 
the museum of the savant and the well read, but the 
kindergarten of child and sage. 

The National Commission will, in due time, take appro- 
priate action touching the formal acceptance of the buildings 
provided under their direction by the World's Columbian 
Exposition Company for this National and International Fair, 
and to you, Mr. President, as the highest representative of 
the Nation, is assigned the honor of dedicating them to the 
purposes determined and declared by the Congress of the 
United States. 

In behalf of the men and women who have devoted them- 
selves to this great work, of the rich who have given of their 
abundance and the poor who have given of their necessities; 
in behalf of the architects who have given to their ideals a 
local habitation and a name, and the artists who have brought 
hither the three graces of modern life, form, color, and melody, 
to decorate and inspire; of the workmen who have prepared 
the grounds and reared the walls; in behalf of the chiefs who 
have organized the work of the exhibitors; in behalf of the 
city of Chicago, which has munificently voted aid; of the 
Congress, which has generously given of the National moneys 
in behalf of the World's Columbian Commission, the World's 
Columbian Exposition Company, and the Board of Lady 
Managers, I ask you to dedicate these buildings and grounds to 
humanity, to the end that all men and women of every clime 



1008 OtJR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

may feel that the evidence of material progress which may 
here meet the eye is good only so far as it may promote that 
higher life which is the true aim of civilization — that the 
evidences of wealth here exhibited and the stimulus herein 
given to industry are good only so far as they may extend the 
area of human happiness. 



ADDRESS 

BY HON. LEVI P. MORTON, VICE PRESIDENT OF 
THE .UNITED, STAT ES. 

Mr. President:— Deep indeed must be the sorrow which 
prohibits the President of the United States from being 
the central figure in these ceremonies. Realizing from 
these sumptuous surroundings, the extent of design, the 
adequacy of execution, and the vastness of results, Ave may 
well imagine how ardently he has aspired to be offici- 
ally and personally connected with this great work, so 
linked to the past and to the present of America. With what 
eloquent words he would have spoken of the heroic achieve- 
ments and radiant future of his beloved country. While pro- 
foundly anguished in his most tender earthly affection, he 
would not have us delay or falter in these dedicatory services, 
and we can only offer to support his courage by a profound 
and universal sympathy. The attention of our whole country, 
and of all peoples elsewhere concerned in industrial progress, 
is to-day fixed upon the city of Chicago. The name of Chicago 
has become familiar with the speech of all civilized communi- 
ties; bureaus are established at many points in Europe for the 
purpose of providing transportation hither; and during the 
coming year the first place suggested to the mind, when men 
talk of America, will be the city of Chicago. This is due nol 
only to the Columbian Exposition which marks an epoch, 
but to the marvellous growth and energy of the second com- 
mercial city of the Union. 

I am not here to recount the wonderful story of the city's 
rise and advancement, of the matchless courage of her people, 
of her second birth out of tin' ashes of the most notable con- 
flagration of modern times, nor of the eminent position she 
has conquered in commerce, in manufactures, in science, ami 
in the arts. These are known of all men who keep pace with 
the world's progress. 

I am here in behalf of the government of the United States, 



1010 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

in behalf of all the people, to bid all hail to Chicago, all hail 
to the Columbian Exposition. 

From the St. Lawrence to the Gulf, and from the peerless 
cosmopolitan capital by the sea to the Golden Gate of Cali- 
fornia, there is no longer a rival city to Chicago, except to 
emulate her in promoting the success of this work. 

New York has signalized the opening of the new era by a 
commemorative function, instructive to the student, en- 
couraging to the philanthropist, and admonitory to the forces 
arrayed against liberty. 

Her houses of worship, without distinction of creed, have 
voiced their thanks to Almighty God for religious freedom; 
her children to the number of five and twenty thousand have 
marched under the inspiration of a light far broader than 
Columbus, with all his thirst for knowledge, enjoyed at the 
University of Pavia; and for three successive days and nights 
processional progresses on land and water, aided by Spain, and 
Italy, and France, saluted the memory of the great pilot with 
the fruits of the great discovery in a pageant more brilliant 
than that at Barcelona, when upon a throne of Persian fabrics, 
Ferdinand and Isabella, disregarded the etiquette of Castile and 
Aragon, received him standing, attended by the most splen- 
did court of Christendom. 

And what a spectacle is presented to us here. As we gaze 
upon these magnificent erections, with their columns and 
arches, their entablatures and adornments, when we consider 
their beauty and rapidity of realization, they would seem to 
be evoked at a wizard's touch of Aladdin's lamp. 

Praise for the organization and accomplishment, for the 
architect and builder, for the artist and artisan may not now 
detain me, for in the years to come in the mouths of all men 
it will be unstinted. 

These are worthy shrines to record the achievements of the 
two Americas, and to place them side by side with the arts and 
industries of the elder world, to the end that we may be 
stimulated and encouraged to new endeavors. Columbus is 
not in chains, nor are Columbian ideas in fetters. I see him, 
as in the great picture under the dome of the Capitol with 



ADDRESS — HOtf. LEVI P. MORTON". 10] 1 

kneeling figures about him, betokening no longer the contrition 
of his followers, but the homage of mankind, with erect form 
and lofty mien animating these children of a new world to 
higher facts and bolder theories. 

We may not now anticipate the character and value of our 
National exhibit. Rather may we modestly anticipate that a 
conservative award will be made by the world's criticism to a 
young Nation eagerly listening to the beckoning future, with- 
in whose limits the lightening was first plucked from heaven 
at the will of man, where the expansive power of steam was 
first compelled to transport mankind and merchandise over 
the waterways of the world, where the implements of agricul- 
ture and handicraft have been so perfected as to lighten the 
burdens of toil, and where the subtle forces of nature, acting 
through the telegraph and telephone, are daily startling the 
world by victories over matter, which in the days of Columbus 
might have been reckoned among the miracles. 

We can safely predict, however, those who will come Erom 
the near and distant regions of our country, and who will 
themselves make part of the national exhibit. We shall see 
the descendants of the loyal cavaliers of Virginia, of the 
Pilgrim fathers of New England, of the sturdy Hollanders 
who in 1624 bought the 22,000 acres of the island of Manhat- 
tan for the sum of $24, of the adherents of the old Christian 
faith who found a resting place in Baltimore, of the Quakers 
and Palatine Germans who settled in Pennsylvania and New 
Jersey, of the Huguenots who fled from the revocation of the 
edict of Nantes to the banks of the Hudson in the North and 
those of the Cooper and Ashley rivers in the South, of the 
refugees from Salzburg in Georgia, and of Charles Edward's 
Highlanders in North Carolina. With them also we shall 
have in person, or in their sons, the thousands of others from 
many climes who, with moderate fortunes, have joined their 
future to that of the great Republic, or who with sinewy arms 
have opened our waterways and builded our ironways. 

We trust that from the lands beyond the seas many will 
come to engage in fraternal competition, or to point us to 
more excellent standards, If they shall find little in our 



1012 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

product to excite their admiration, we shall welcome them to 
the atmosphere of the New World, where some of the hest 
efforts have been made in the cause of freedom and progress 
by Washington, and Franklin, and Lafayette ; by Agassiz, and 
Lincoln, and Grant; by Bolivar, and Juarez, and Toussaint 
L'Ouverture; by Fulton, and Morse, and Edison. 

Columbus lived in the age of great events. When he was 
a child in 1440 printing was first done with movable types; 
seven years later the Vatican Library, the great fountain of 
learning, was founded by Nicholas the Fifth ; and 1455 is given 
as the probable date of the Mazarine Bible, the earliest printed 
book known. It was not until a hundred years after the 
discovery that Galileo, pointing his little telescope to the sky, 
found the satellites of Jupiter, and was hailed as the Columbus 
of the heavens. His character was complex, as was that of 
many of the men of i. >s time who made their mark in history. 
But his character and attainments are to be estimated by 
those of his contemporaries, and not by other standards. 
Deeply read in mathematical science, he was certainly the 
best geographer of his time. I believe, with Castelar, that he 
was sincerely religious, but his sincerity did not prevent his 
indulging in dreams. He projected, as the eloquent Spanish 
orator says, the purchase of the holy places of Jerusalem, in 
the event of his finding seas of pearls, cities of gold, streets 
paved with sapphires, mountains of emeralds, and rivers of 
diamonds. How remote, and yet how marvellous, has been 
the realization ! Two products of the Southern continent which 
he touched and brought into the world's economy have proved 
of inestimable value to the race, far beyond what the imagined 
wealth of the Indians could buy. 

The potato, brought by the Spaniards from what is now the 
Republic of Ecuador, in the beginning of the century follow- 
ing the discovery, has proved, next to the principal cereals, to 
be the most valuable of all plants for human food. It has 
sensibly increased the wealth of nations and added immeasur- 
ably to the welfare of the people. More certain than other 
crops, and having little to fear from storm or drouth, it is 
hailed as an effectual barrier against the recurrence of 
famines. 



A.DDBESS- liox. LEVI I'. MORTON". L013 

Nor was the other product of less importance to man kind. 
Peruvian bark comes from a tree of spontaneous growth in 
Peru, and many other parts of South America. It received 
its botanical name from the wife of a Spanish viceroy, liberated 
from an intermittent fever by its use. Its most important 
base, quinine, has come to be regarded, as nearly as may bo, 
as a specific for that disease and also for the preservation of 
health in certain latitudes, so that no vessel would dure to 
approach the east or west coast of Africa without a supply, 
and parts of our own land would be made partially desolate 
by its disappearance. No words that I could use could mag- 
nify the blessings brought to mankind by these two individuals 
of the vegetable kingdom from the shores of the New World. 

Limited time for preparation does not permit me to speak 
authoritatively of the progress and proud position of our sister 
republics and of the Dominion of Canada to demonstrate the 
moral and material fruits of the great discovery. Concerning 
ourselves the statistics are familiar and constitute a marvel. 
One of the States recently admitted, the State of Montana, 
is larger than the empire of Turkey. 

We are near the beginning of another century, and if no 
serious change occurs in our present growth in the year L935, 
in the lifetime of many now in manhood, the English speak- 
ing Eepublicans of America will number more than 180,000,- 
000. And for them, John Bright in a burst of impassioned 
eloquence, predicts one people, one language, one law, and 
one faith; and all over the wide continent, the home of free- 
dom and a refuge for the oppressed of every race and every 
clime. 

The transcendent feature in the character of Columbus was 
his faith. That sustained him in days of trials and darkness, 
and finally gave him the great discovery. Like him, let us 
have faith in our future. To insure that future, the fountains 
must be kept pure, public integrity must be preserved. 
While we reverence what Garibaldi and Victor Emmanuel 
fought for, the union of peoples, we must secure above all 
elsewhat Steuben and Kosciusko aided our fathers to establish 
— liberty regulated by law. 



1014 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

If the time should ever come when men trifle with the 
public conscience, let me predict the patriotic action of the 
Republic in the language of Alilton: 

"Methinks I see in my mind a noble and puissant nation 
rousing herself like a strong man after sleep, and shaking her 
invincible locks; methinks I see her as an eagle mewing her 
mighty youth, and kindling her undazzled eyes at the full 
midday beam; purging and unsealing her long abused sight 
at the fountain itself of heavenly radiance; while the whole 
noise of timorous and flocking birds, with those also that love 
the twilight flutter about, amazed at what she means." 

Mr. President, in the name of the Government of the 
United States, I hereby dedicate these buildings and their 
appurtenances, intended by the Congress of the United 
States for the use of the World's Columbian Exposition, to 
the world's progress in art, in science, in agriculture, and 
in manufactures. 

I dedicate them to humanity. 

God save the United States of America. 



THE AGE OF PKOGKESS AND GOOD FEELING. 

ORATION 15V IK).\. HENRY WATTEKSON OF 
KENTUCKY. 

AT THE DEDICATION OF THE COLUMBIAN EXHIBITION BUILD- 
INGS, Chicago, October 22, L892. 

Among the wonders of creative and constructive genius in 
course of preparation for this festival of the nations, whose 
formal and official inauguration has brought us together, will 
presently be witnessed upon the margin of the inter-ocean, 
which gives to this noble and beautiful city the character and 
rank of a maritime metropolis, a spectatorium, where in the 
Columbian epic will be told with realistic effect surpassing 
the most splendid and impressive achievements of the modern 
stage. No one, who has had the good fortune to see the 
models of this extraordinary work of art, can have failed to be 
moved by the union, which it embodies, of the antique in 
history and the current in life and thought, as beginning with 
the weird mendicant, fainting upon the hillside of Santa 
Rapida it traces the strange adventures of the Genoese 
seer from the royal camp of Santa Fe to the sunny 
coasts of the Isle of Inde; through the weary watches of the 
endless night, whose sentinel stars seemed set to mock but 
not to guide; through the trackless and shoreless wastes of 
the mystic sea-, spread day by day to bear upon every rise and 
fall of its heaving bosom the death of fear, fond hopes, the 
birth of fantastic fears; the peerless and thrilling revelation, 
and all that has followed to the very moment that beholds us 
here, citizens, freemen, equal shareholders in the miracle of 
American civilization and development. Is there one among 
us who does not thank his .Maker that he has lived to join in 
this universal celebration, this jubilee of mankind? 

I am appalled when I reflect upon the portent and meaning 
of the proclamation which has been delivered in ourpresence. 
The painter employed by the king's command to render to the 
eye some particular exploit of the people, or the throne, knows 



1016 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

in advance precisely what lie has to do; there is a limit set 
upon his purpose; his canvas is measured; his colors are 
blended, and, with the steady and sure hand of the master, he 
proceeds, touch upon touch, to body forth the forms of things 
known and visible. Who shall measure the canvas or blend 
the colors that are to bring to the mind's eye of the present 
the scenes of the past in American glory? Who shall dare 
attempt to summon the dead to life, and out of the tomb of 
the ages recall the tones of the martyrs and heroes whose 
voices, though silent forever, still speak to us in all that we 
are as a Nation, in all that Ave do as men and women? 

We look before and after, and we see through the half-drawn 
folds of time as through the solemn archways of some grand 
cathedral the long procession pass, as silent and as real as a 
dream; the caravals, tossing upon Atlantic billows, have their 
sails refilled from the East and bear away to the West; the 
land is reached, and fulfilled is the vision whose actualities 
are to be gathered by other hands than his who planned the 
voyage and steered the bark of discovery; the long-sought, 
golden day has come to Spain at last, and Castilian conquests 
tread one upon another fast enough to pile up perpetual 
power and riches. 

But even as simple justice was denied Columbus was lasting 
tenure denied the Spaniard. 

We look again, and we see in the far Northeast the old- 
world struggle between the French and English transferred to 
the new ending in the tragedy upon the heights above Quebec; 
we see the sturdy Puritans in bell-crowned hats and sable gar- 
ments assail in unequal battle the savage and the elements, over- 
coming both to rise against a mightier foe; we see the gay, 
but dauntless cavaliers, to the southward, join hands with 
the Soundheads in holy rebellion. And, lo, down from the 
green-walled hills of New England, out of the swamps of the 
Carolinas, come faintly to the ear like far-away forest leaves 
stirred to music by autumn winds, the drum-taps of the 
Revolution; the tramp of the minute-men; Israel Putman 
riding before; the hoof -beats of Sumter's horse galloping to 
the front; the thunder of Stark's guns in spirit-battle; the 



ORATION — HON. HENEY WATTE LiSON. 10L7 

gleam of Marion's watch-fires in ghostly bivouac, and there, 
there in serried, saint-like ranks on fame's eternal camping 
ground, stand— 

" The old continentals, 

In their ragged regimentals, 
Yielding not," 

as, amid the singing of angels in heaven, the scene is shut out 
from our mortal vision by proud and happy tears. 

We see the rise of the young Republic ; and the gentlemen in 
knee-breeches and powdered wigs who signed the Declaration, 
and the gentlemen in knee-breeches and powdered wigs who 
made the Constitution. We see the little Nation menaced 
from without. We see the riflemen in hunting shirt and 
buckskin swarm from the cabin in the wilderness to the rescue 
of country and home; and our hearts swell to a second and 
final decree of independance won by the prowess and valor of 
American arms upon the land and sea. 

And then, and then — since there is no life of nations or of 
men without its shadow and its sorrow — there comes a day 
when the spirits of the fathers no longer walk upon the 
battlements of freedom; and all is dark; and all seems lost, 
save liberty and honor, and, praise God, our blessed Union. 
With these surviving, who shall marvel at what we see to- 
day; this land filled with the treasures of earth; this city, 
snatched from the ashes, to rise in splendor and renown, 
passing the mind to preconceive? 

Truly, out of trial comes the strength of man, out of 
disaster comes the glory of the State! 

We are met this day to honor the memory of Christopher 
Columbus, to celebrate the four-hundredth annual return of 
the year of his transcendent achievement, and, with fitting 
rites, to dedicate to America and the universe a concrete 
exposition of the world's progress between 1492 and 1 892. No 
twenty centuries can be compared with those four centuries. 
either in importance or in interest, as no previous ceremonial 
can be compared with this in its wide significance and reach; 
because, since the advent of the Son of God, no event lias 



1018 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

had so great an influence upon human affairs as the discovery 
of the Western hemisphere. Each of the centuries that have 
intervened marks many revolutions. The merest catalogue 
would crowd a thousand pages. The story of the least of the 
nations would till a volume. In what I have to say upon this 
occasion, therefore, I shall confine myself to our own: and, 
in speaking of the United States of America, I propose rather 
to dwell upon our character as a people and our reciprocal 
obligations and duties as an aggregation of communities, held 
together by a fixed constitution, and charged with the custody 
of a union upon whose preservation and perpetuation in its 
original spirit and purpose the future of free, popular govern- 
ment depends, than to enter into a dissertation upon abstract 
principles, or to undertake a historio essay. We are a plain, 
practical people. We are a race of inventors and workers, 
not of poets and artists. Ve have led the world's movement, 
not its thought. Our deeds are to be found not upon frescoed 
Avails, or in ample libraries, but in the machine shop where 
the spindles sing and the looms thunder; on the open plain, 
where the steam-plow, the reaper, and the mower contend with 
one another in friendly war against the obduracies of nature; 
in the magic of electricity as it penetrates the darkest caverns 
with its irresistable power and light. Let us consider our- 
selves and our conditions, as far as we are able, with a candor 
untinged by cynicism and a confidence having no air of assur- 
ance. 

A better opportunity could not be desired for a study of our 
peculiarities than is furnished by the present moment. 

We are in the midst of the quadrennial period established 
for the selection of a Chief Magistrate. Each citizen has his 
right of choice, each has his right to vote and to have his vote 
freely cast and fairly counted. Wherever this right is assailed 
for any cause wrong is done and evil must follow, first to the 
whole country, which has an interest in all its parts, but most 
to the community immediately involved, which must actually 
drink of the cup that has contained the poison, and cannot 
escape its infection. 

The abridgement of the right of suffrage, however, is very 



OK.VTIOX— II()X. 1IKNUY WATTERSON. 1019 

nearly proportioned to the ignorance or indifference of the 
parties concerned by it, and there is good reason to hope that, 
with the expanding intelligence of the masses and the growing 
enlightenment of the times, this particular form of corruption 
in elections will be reduced below the danger-line. 

To that end, as to all other good ends, the moderation of public 
sentiment must ever be our chief reliance; for when men are 
forced by the general desire for truth, and the light which 
our modern vehicles of information throw upon truth, to 
discuss public questions for truth's sake, when it becomes the 
plain interest of public men, as it is their plain duty, to do 
this and when, above all, friends and neighbors cease to love 
one another less because of individual differences of opinion 
about public affairs, tike struggle for unfair advantage will 
he relegated to those who have either no character to lose, or 
none to seek. 

It is admitted on all sides that the current Presidential 
campaign is freer from excitement and tumult than was ever 
known before, and it is argued from this circumstance that we 
are traversing the epoch of the commonplace. If this be so, 
thank God for it! We have had full enough of the dramatic 
and sensational, and need a season of mediocrity and repose. 
But may we not ascribe the rational way in which the people 
are going about their business to larger knowledge and ex- 
perience and a fairer spirit than hitherto marked our party 
contentious? 

Parties are as essential to free government as oxygen is to 
the atmosphere, or sunshine to vegetation. And party spirit 
is inseparable from party organism. To the extent that it is 
tempered by good sense and good feeling, by love of country 
and integrity of purpose, it is a supreme virtue; and there 
should be no gag short of a decent regard for the sensibilities of 
others put upon its freedom and plainness of utterance. Other- 
wise, the limpid pool of democracy would stagnate, and we 
should have a Republic only in name. But we should never 
cease to be admonished by the warning words of the Father of 
his Country against the excess of party spirit, re-enforced as 
they are by the experience of a century of party warfare ; a 



1020 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

warfare happily culminating in the complete triumph of 
American principles, but brought many times dangerously 
near to the annihilation of all that was great and noble in the 
National life. 

Sursum Corda. We have, in our own time seen the 
Republic survive an irrepressible conflict, sown in the blood 
and marrow of the social order. We have seen the Federal 
Union, not too strongly put together in the first place, come 
out of a great war of sections stronger than when it went into 
it, its faith renewed, its credit rehabilitated, and its flag saluted 
with love and homage by 60,000,000 of God-fearing men and 
women, thoroughly reconciled and homogeneous. We have 
seen the Federal Constitution outlast the strain, not merely 
of a reconstructory ordeal and a Presidential impeachment, 
but a disputed count of the electoral vote, a Congressional dead- 
lock, and an extra constitutional tribunal, yet standing firm 
against the assaults of its enemies, while yielding it- 
self with admirable flexibility to the needs of the country and 
the time. And, finally, we saw the gigantic fabric of the 
Federal Government transferred from hands that had held it 
a quarter of a century to other hands, without a protest, 
although so close was the poll in the final count that a single 
blanket might have covered both contestants for the chief 
magisterial office. With such a record behind us, who shall 
be afraid of the future? 

The young manhood of the country may take this lesson 
from those of us who lived through times that did, indeed, 
try men's souls — when, pressed down from day to day by aw- 
ful responsibilities and suspense, each night brought a terror 
with every thought of the morrow and, when, look where we 
would, there were light and hope nowhere — that God reigns 
and wills, and that this fair land is, and always has been, in 
His own keeping. 

The curse of slavery is gone. It was a joint heritage of 
woe, to be wiped out and expiated in blood and flame. The 
mirage of the Confederacy has vanished. It was essentially 
bucolic, a vision of Arcadie, the dream of a most attractive 
economic fallacy. The constitution is no longer a rope of 



ORATION" — II OK. HKKRY WATTEttSON. 1021 

sand. The exact relation of the States to the Federal Govern- 
ment, left open to double construction by the authors of our 
organic being, because they could not agree among themselves, 
and union was the paramount object, has been clearly and 
definitely fixed by the three last amendments to the original 
chart, which constitute the real treaty of peace between the 
North and the South, and seal our bonds as a Nation forever. 

The Republic represents at last the letter and the spirit of 
the sublime Declaration. The fetters that bound her to the 
earth are burst asunder. The rags that degraded her beauty 
are cast aside. Like the enchanted princess in the legend, 
clad in spotless raiment, and wearing a crown of living light, 
she steps in the perfection of her maturity upon the scene of 
this — the latest and proudest of her victories — to bid a welcome 
to the world ! 

Need I pursue the theme? This vast assemblage speaks 
with a resonance and meaning which words can never reach. 
It speaks from the fields that are blessed by the never-failing 
waters of the Kennebec and from the farms that sprinkle the 
valley of the Connecticut with mimic principalities more 
potent and lasting than the real; it speaks in the whir of the 
mills of Pennsylvania and in the ring of the wood-cutter's 
ax from the forests of the lake peninsulas; it speaks from the 
great plantations of the South and West, teeming with staples 
that insure us wealth and power and stability, yea, and from 
the mines and forests and quarries of Michigan and Wiscon- 
sin, of Alabama and Georgia, of Tennessee and Kentucky, 
far away to the regions of silver and gold, that have linked 
the Colorado and the Rio Grande in close embrace, and anni- 
hilated time and space between the Atlantic and the Pari tie, 
it speaks in one word from the hearth-stone in Iowa and 
Illinois, from the home in Mississippi and Arkansas, from 
the hearts of 70,000,000, of fearless, free-born men and women, 
and that one word is " Union." 

There is no geography in American manhood. There are 
no sections to American fraternity. It needs but six weeks 
to change a Vermonter into a Texan, and there never has 
been a time when upon the battlefield or the frontier, Puritan 



1022 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

and Cavalier were not convertible terms, having in the begin- 
ning a common origin, and so diffused and diluted on Ameri- 
can soil as no longer to possess a local habitation, or a nativity, 
except in the National unit. 

The men who planted the signals of American civilization 
upon that sacred rock by Plymouth Bay were Englishmen, 
and so were the men who struck the coast a little lower down, 
calling their haven of rest after the great Republican Com- 
moner, and founding by Hampton Roads a race of heroes and 
statesmen, the mention of whose names brings a thrill to 
every- heart. The South claims Lincoln, the immortal, for 
its own; the North has no right to reject Stonewall Jackson, 
the one typical Puritan soldier of the war, for its own. Nor 
will it! The time is coming, is almost here, when hanging 
above many a mantel-board in fair New England — glorifying 
many a cottage in the Sunny South — shall be seen bound 
together, in everlasting love and honor, two cross-swords carried 
to battle respectively by the grandfather who wore the blue 
and the grandfather who wore the gray. 

I cannot trust myself to proceed. We have come here not 
so much to recall bygone sorrows and glories as to bask in the 
sunshine of present prosperity and happiness, to interchange 
patriotic greetings and indulge good auguries, and, above all, 
to meet upon the threshold the stranger within our gate, not 
as a foreigner, but as a guest and friend, for whom nothing 
that we have is too good. 

From wheresoever he cometh we welcome him with all our 
hearts; the son of the Rhone and the Garonne, our god-mother, 
France, to whom we owe so much, he shall be our Lafayette; 
the son of the Rhine and the Mozelle, he shall be our Goethe 
and our Wagner; the son of the Campagna and the Vesuvian 
Bay, he shall be our Michael Angelo and our Garibaldi; the 
son of Aragon and the Indies, he shall be our Christopher 
Columbus, fitly honored at last throughout the world. 

Our good cousin, of England, needs no words of special 
civility and courtesy from us. For him, the latch-string is 
ever on the outer side; though whether it be or not, we are 
sure that he will enter and make himself at home. Acorn- 



ORATION— TICN-. HENRY WATTERSON. K'.'H 

mon language enables us to do full justice to one another, at 

the festive board, or in the arena of debate; warning both of 
us in equal tones against further parley on the field of anus. 

All nations and all creeds be welcome here; from the 
Bosphorous and the Black Sea, the Viennese woods and the 
Danubian plains; from Holland dyke to Alpine crag; from 
Belgrade to Calcutta, and round to China seas and the busy 
marts of Japan, the isles of the Pacific and the far-away capes 
of Africa — Armenian, Christian, and Jew — the American, 
loving no country except his own, but loving all mankind 
as his brother, bids you enter and fear not; bids you partake 
with us of these fruits of 400 years of American civilization 
ami development, and behold these trophies of one hundred 
years of American independence and freedom ! 



AN ORATION 

BY HON. CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW OF NEW 
YORK. 

DELIVERED AT CHICAGO, OCT. 22d, 1892. 

This day belongs not to America, but to the world. The 
results of the event it commemorates are the heritage of the 
peoples of every race and clime. We celebrate the emanci- 
pation of man. The preparation was the work of almost count- 
less centuries; the realization was the revelation of one. The 
Cross on Calvary was hope; the cross raised on San Salvador 
was opportunity. But for the first Columbus would never 
have sailed; but for the second, there would have been no 
place for the planting, the nurture and the expansion of civil 
and religious liberty. Ancient history is a dreary record of 
unstable civilizations. Each reached its zenith of material 
splendor and perished. The Assyrian, Persian, Egyptian, 
Grecian, and Roman empires were proofs of the possibilities 
and limitations of man for conquest and intellectual develop- 
ment. Their destruction involved a sum of misery and 
relapse which made their creation rather a curse than a 
blessing. 

Force was the factor in the government of the world when 
Christ was born, and force was the sole source and exercise of 
authority both by church and state when Columbus sailed 
from Palos. The wise men travelled from the East toward 
the West under the guidance of the star of Bethlehem. The 
spirit of the equality of all men before God and the law moved 
westward from Calvary with its revolutionary influence upon 
old institutions to the Atlantic Ocean. Columbus carried it 
westward across the seas. The emigrants from England, 
Ireland, Scotland, and Wales, from Germany and Holland, 
from Sweden and Denmark, from France and Italy, have, 
under its guidance and inspiration, moved west, and again 
west, building States and founding cities until the Pacific 
limited their march. The exhibition of arts and sciences, of 



ORATION— HON. CHAUXCEY M. DEPEW. 1025 

industries and inventions, of education and civilization, which 
the Republic of the United States will here present and to 
which, through its Chief Magistrate, it invites all nations, 
condenses and displays the flower and fruitage of this trans- 
cendent miracle. 

The anarchy and chaos which followed the breaking up of 
the Roman Empire necessarily produced the feudal system. 
The people, preferring slavery to annihilation by robberchiefs, 
became the vassals of territorial lords. The reign of physical 
force is one of perpetual struggle for the mastery. Power 
which rests upon the sword neither shares nor limits its 
authority. The king destroyed the lords, and the monarchy 
succeeded feudalism. Neither of these institutions considered 
or consulted the people. They had no part, but to suffer or 
die in this mighty strife of masters for the mastery. But the 
throne, by its broader view and greater resources, made 
possible the construction of the highways of freedom. Under 
its banner races could mute, and petty principalities be merged, 
law substituted for brute force, and right for might. It 
founded and endowed universities and encouraged commerce. 
It conceded no political privileges, but unconsciously prepared 
its subjects to demand them. 

Absolutism in the state and bigoted intolerance in the 
church shackled popular unrest and imprisoned thought and 
enterprise in the fifteenth century. The divine right of 
kings stamped out the faintest glimmer of revolt against 
tyranny; and the problems of science, whether of the skies 
or of the earth, were solved or submerged by ecclesiastical 
decrees. The dungeon was ready for the philosopher who 
proclaimed the truths of the solar system, or the navigator 
who would prove the sphericity of the earth. An English 
Gladstone or a French Gambetta or a German Bismarck or an 
Italian Garibaldi or a Spanish Castelar would have been 
thought monsters and their deaths at the stake or on the 
scaffold and under the anathemas of the church would 
have received the praise and approval of kings and 
nobles, of priests and peoples. Reason had oo seat in spiritual 
or temporal realms. Punishment was the incentive t<» patri- 



1026 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

• 

otism, and piety was held possible by torture. Confessions of 
faith extorted from the writhing victim on the rack were be- 
lieved efficacious in saving his soul from fires eternal beyond 
the grave. For all that humanity to-day cherishes as its 
best heritage and choicest gifts, there was neither thought 
nor hope. 

Fifty years before Columbus sailed from Palos, Guttenberg 
and Faust had forged the hammer which was to break the 
bonds of superstition and open the prison door of the mind. 
They had invented the printing press, and movable types. 
The prior adoption of a cheap process for the manufacture of 
paper at once utilized the press. Its first service, like all its 
succeeding efforts, was for the people. The universities and 
the schoolmen, the privileged and the learned few of that age, 
were longing for the revelation and preservation of the classic 
treasures of antiquity, hidden, and yet insecure in monastic 
cells and libraries. 

But the first born of the marvelous creation of these prim- 
itive printers of Mayence was the printed Bible. The price- 
less contributions of Greece and Rome to the intellectual- 
training and development of the modern world came after- 
ward, through the same wondrous machine. The force, how- 
ever, which made possible America, and its reflex influence 
upon Europe, was the open Bible by the family fireside. And 
yet neither the enlightenment of the new learning nor the 
dynamic power of the spiritual awakening could break through 
the crust of caste which had been forming for centuries. 
Church and state had so firmly and dexterously interwoven 
the bars of privilege and authority that liberty was impossi- 
ble from within. Its piercing light and fervent heat must 
penetrate from without. 

Civil and religious freedom are founded upon the individual 
and his independence, his Avorth, his rights and his equal 
status and opportunity. For his planting and development, 
a new land must be found, where with limitless areas for ex- 
pansion, the avenues of progress would have no bars of custom 
or heredity, of social orders, or privileged classes. The time 
had come for the emancipation of the mind and soul of hu- 



ORATION — HON". cilAI'Ni'KY M. DEPEW. 1027 

manity. The factors wanting for its fulfillment were the 
new world and its discoverer. 

God always lias in training some commanding genius for 
the control of great crises in the affairs of nations and peoples. 
The numbers of these leaders are less than the centuries, but 
their lives are the history of human progress. Though ( laesar 
and Charlemagne, and Hildebrand, and Luther, and William 
the Conqueror, and Oliver Cromwell, and all the epoch makers 
prepared Europe for the event, and contributed to the result, 
the lights which illumine our firmament to-day are Columbus 
the discoverer, Washington the founder, and Lincoln the 
savior. 

Neither realism nor romance furnishes a more striking and 
picturesque figure than that of Christopher Columbus. The 
mystery about his origin heightens the charm of his story. 
That he came from among the toilers of his time is in har- 
mony Avith the struggles of our period. Forty-four authentic 
portraits of him have descended to us, and no two of them 
are the counterfeits of the same person. Each represents a 
character as distinct as its canvas. Strength and weakness, 
intellectuality and stupidity, high moral purpose and brutal 
ferocity, purity and licentiousness, the dreamer ami the miser, 
the pirate and the puritan, are the types from which we may 
select our hero. We dismiss the painter, and piercing with 
the clarified vision of the dawn of the twentieth century, the 
veil of four hundred years, we construct our Columbus. 

The perils of the sea, in his youth upon the rich argosies of 
Genoa, or in the service of the licensed rovers who made them 
their prey, had developed a skillful navigator and intrepid 
mariner. They had given him a glimpse of the possibilities 
of the unknown, beyond the highways of travel, which roused 
an unquenchable thirst for adventure and research. The 
study of the narratives of previous explorers and diligent ques- 
tionings of the daring spirits who had ventured far toward 
the fabled West, gradually evolved a theory, which became in 
his mind so fixed a fact, that he could inspire others with his 
own passionate beliefs. The words, "that is a lie," written 
by him on the margin of nearly every page of a volume of the 



1028 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

travels of Marco Polo, which is still to be found in a Genoese 
library, illustrate the skepticism of his beginning, and the 
first vision of the new world tbe fulfillment of his faith. 

To secure the means to test the truth of his speculations, 
this poor and unknown dreamer must win the support of 
kings and overcome the hostility of the church. He never 
doubted his ability to do both, though he knew of no man 
living who was so great in power, or lineage, or learning that 
he could accomplish either. Unaided and alone he succeeded 
in arousing the jealousies of sovereigns, and dividing the coun- 
cils of the ecclesiastics. "I will command your fleet and dis- 
cover for you new realms, but only on condition that you 
confer on me hereditary nobility, the admiralty of the ocean, 
and the vice royalty, and one-tenth the revenues of the new 
world," were his haughty terms to King John of Portugal. 
After ten years of disappointment and poverty, subsisting 
most of the time upon the charity of the enlightened monk 
of the convent of Rabida, who was his unfaltering friend, he 
stood before the throne of Ferdinand and Isabella, and rising 
to imperial dignity in his rags, embodied the same royal con- 
ditions in his petition. The capture of Granada, the expul- 
sion of Islam from Europe, and the triumph of the cross, 
aroused the admiration and devotion of Christendom. But 
this proud beggar, holding in his grasp the potential promise, 
and dominion of El Dorado and Cathay, divided with the 
Moslem surrender, the attention of sovereigns and of bishops. 

France and England indicated a desire to hear his theories 
and see his maps, while he was still a suppliant at the gates 
of the camp of Castile and Aragon, the sport of its courtiers, 
and the scoff of its confessors. His unshakable faith that 
Christopher Columbus was commissioned from heaven, both 
by his name and by Divine command, to carry " Christ across 
the sea" to new continents and pagan peoples, lifted him so 
far above the discouragements of an empty purse, and a con- 
temptuous court, that he was proof against the rebuffs of for- 
tune, or of friends. To conquer the prejudices of the clergy, 
to win the approval and financial support of the state, to ven- 
ture upon that unknown ocean, which, according to the beliefs 



ORATION— HON'. .IIAI \ci:v M. DEPEW. 1029 

of the age, was peopled with demons and savage beasts of 
frightful shape, and from which there was do possibility of 
return, required the zeal of Peter the Hermit, the chivalric 
courage of the Cid, and the imagination of Dante. Columbus 
belonged to that high order of cranks who confidently walk 
where "angels fear to tread," and often become the benefac- 
tors of their country or their kind. 

It was a happy omen of the position which woman was to 
hold in America, that the only person who comprehended the 
majestic scope of his plans, and the invincible quality of his 
genius, was the able and gracious Queen of Castille. Isabella 
alone of all the dignitaries of that age, shares with Columbus 
the honor of his great achievement, She arrayed her king- 
dom and her private fortune behind the enthusiasm of this 
mystic mariner, and posterity pays homage to her wisdom 
and faith. 

The overthrow of the Mohammedan power in Spain would 
have been a forgotten scene, in one of the innumerable acts in 
the grand drama of history, had not Isabella conferred im- 
mortality upon herself, her husband and their dual crown by 
her recognition of Columbus. The devout spirit of the queen, 
and the high purpose of the explorer inspired the voyage, 
subdued the mutinous crew, and prevailed over the raging 
storms. They covered with the divine radiance of religion 
and humanity the degrading search for gold, and the horrors 
of its quest, which filled the first century of conquest with 
every form of lust and greed. 

The mighty soul of the great admiral was undaunted by the 
ingratitude of princes and the hostility of the people, by im- 
prisonment and neglect. He died as he was securing the 
means and preparing a campaign for the rescue of the Holy 
Sepulcher at Jerusalem from the infidel. He did not know 
what time has revealed — that while the mission of the cru- 
sades of Godfrey of Bouillon and Richard of the Lion Heart 
was a bloody and fruitless task, the discovery of America was 
the salvation of the world. The one was the symbol, the 
other the spirit; the one death, the other life. The tomb of 
the Savior was a narrow and empty vault, precious only for 



1080 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

its memories of the supremo tragedy of the centuries, but the 
new continent was to be the home and temple of the living 
God. 

The rulers of the old world began with partitioning the 
new. To them the discovery was expansion of empire, and 
grandeur to the throne. Vast territories, whose properties 
and possibilities were little understood, and whose extent was 
greater than the kindgom of the sovereigns, were the gifts to 
court favorites, and the prizes of royal approval. But indi- 
vidual intelligence and independent conscience found here a 
haven and refuge. They were the passengers upon the cara- 
vels of Columbus, and he was unconsciously making for the 
port of civil and religious liberty. Thinkers who believed men 
capable of higher destinies and larger responsibilities, and 
pious people who preferred the Bible, to that union of church 
and state where each serves the other for the temporal benefit 
of both, fled to these distant and hospitable lands from intol- 
erable and hopeless oppression at home. It required three 
hundred years for the people thus happily situated, to under- 
stand their own powers and resources, and to break bonds 
which were still reverenced or loved, no matter how deeply 
they wounded, or how hard they galled. 

The nations of Europe were so completely absorbed in dy- 
nastic difficulties, and devastating wars, with diplomacy and 
ambitions, that they neither heeded nor heard of the growing 
democratic spirit and intelligence in their American colonies. 
To them these provinces were sources of revenue, and they 
never dreamed that they were also schools of liberty. That 
it exhausted three centuries under the most favorable condi- 
tions for the evolution of freedom on this continent, demon- 
strates the tremendous strength of heredity when sanctioned 
and sanctified by religion. The very chains which fettered, 
became inextricably interwoven with the habits of life, the 
associations of childhood, the tenderest ties of the family, and 
the sacred offices of the church from the cradle to the grave. 
It clearly proves that if the people of the old world and their 
descendants had not possessed the opportunities afforded by 
the new for their emancipation, and mankind had never ex- 



ORATION" — HON. OlIAiNcl.Y M. DEPEW. 1031 

perienced and learned the American example, instead of living 
in the light and glory of nineteenth century conditions, they 
would still be struggling with mediaeval problems. 

The Northern continent was divided between England, 
France and Spain, and the Southern between Spain and Por- 
tugal. France wanting the capacity for colonization, which 
still characterizes her, gave up her Western possessions and 
left the English, who have the genius of universal empire, 
masters of North America. The development of the experi- 
ment in the English domain makes this day memorable. It 
is due to the wisdom and courage, the faith and virtue of the 
inhabitants of this territory that government of the people, 
for the people, and by the people, was inaugurated, and has 
become a triumphant success. The Puritan settled in New 
England and the Cavalier in the South. They represented 
the opposites of spiritual and temporal life and opinions. The 
processes of liberty liberalized the one and elevated the other. 
Washington and Adams were the new types. Their nnion in 
a common cause gave the world a Republic both stable and 
free. It possessed conservatism without bigotry, and liberty 
without license. It founded institutions strong enough to 
resist revolution, and elastic enough for indefinite extension 
to meet the requirements in government of ever enlarging 
areas of population, and the ueeds of progress and growth. 

The May tlower, with the Pilgrims, and a Dutch ship laden 
with African slaves, were on the ocean at the same time, the 
one -sailing for .Massachusetts, and the other for Virginia. 
This company of saints, and first, cargo of slaves, represented 
the forces which were to peril and rescue free government. 
The slaver was the product of the commercial spirit of 
Great Britain, and the greed of the times to stimulate pro- 
duction in the colonies. The men who wrote in the cabin of 
the Mayflower the first charter of freedom, a government of 
just and equal laws, were a little band of Protestants against 
every form of injustice and tyranny. The leaven of their 
principles made possible the Declaration of Independence, 
liberated the slaves, and founded the (vrv. commonwealths 
which form the Republic of the United Stat 



1032 OUIl NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

Platforms of principles, by petition, or protest or statement, 
have been as frequent as revolts against established authority. 
They are part of the political literature of all nations. The 
Declaration of Independence proclaimed at Philadelphia, 
July 4, 1776, is the only one of them which arrested the 
attention of the world when it was published, and lias held 
its undivided interest ever since. The vocabulary of the 
equality of man has been in familiar use by philosophers and 
statesmen for ages. It expressed noble sentiments, but their 
application was limited to classes or conditions. The masses 
cared little for them nor remembered them long. Jefferson's 
superb crystallization of the popular opinion, that "all men 
are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator 
with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, 
liberty and the pursuit of happiness," had its force and effect 
in being the deliberate utterance of the people. It swept 
away in a single sentence kings and nobles, peers and prelates. 
It was Magna Charta, and the petition of rights planted in the 
virgin soil of the American wilderness, and bearing richer and. 
riper fruit. Under its vitalizing influence upon the individual, 
the farmer left his plow in the furrow, the lawyer his books 
and briefs, the merchant his shop, and the workman his 
bench, to enlist in the patriot army. They were righting for 
themselves and their children. They embodied the idea in 
their constitution, in the immortal words with which that 
great instrument of liberty and order began : " We, the people 
of the United States, do ordain." 

The scope and limitations of this idea of freedom have neither 
been misinterpreted nor misunderstood. The laws of nature 
in their application to the rise and recognition of men accord- 
ing to their mental, moral, spiritual, and physical endowments 
are left undisturbed. But the accident of birth gives no rank 
and confers no privilege. Equal rights and common oppor- 
tunity for all have been the spurs of ambition and the motors 
of progress. They have established the common schools and 
built the public libraries. A sovereign people have learned 
and enforced the lesson of free education. 

The practice of government is itself a liberal education. 






ORATION— HON. CHAUNCEY M. DEPEW. 1033 

People who make their own laws need no law-givers. After 
a century of successful trial the system has passed the 
period of experiment, and its demonstrated permanency 
and power are revolutionizing the governments of the 
world. It has raised the largest armies of modern times for 
self-preservation, and at the successful termination of the war 
returned the soldiers to the pursuits of peace, [t has so 
adjusted itself to the pride and patriotism of the defeated that 
they vie with the victors in their support and enthusiasm of 
the old Hag and our common country. Imported anarchists 
have preached their baleful doctrines, but have made no 
converts. They have tried to inaugurate a reign of terror 
under the banner of the violent seizure and distribution of 
property, only to be defeated, imprisoned, and executed by 
the law made by the people and enforced by juries selected 
from the people, and judges and prosecuting officers elected 
by the people. Socialism finds disciples only among those who 
were its votaries before they were forced to fly from their 
native land, but it does not take root upon American 
soil. The State neither supports nor permits taxation 
to maintain the church. The citizen can worship God 
according to his belief and conscience, or he may neither 
reverence nor recognize the Almighty. And yet religion has 
flourished, churches abound, the ministry is sustained, and 
millions of dollars are contributed annually for the evangeli- 
zation of the world. The United States is a Christian country, 
and a living and practical Chrisitanity is the characteristic of 
its people. 

Benjamin Franklin, philosopher and patriot, amused the 
jaded courtiers of Louis XVI., by his talks about liberty, and 
entertained the scientists of France by bringing lightning from 
the clouds. In the reckoning of time the period from Franklin 
to Morse, and from Morse to Edison, is but a span, and yet it 
marks a material development as marvelous as it has been be- 
nificent. The world has been brought into contact and sympa- 
thy. The electric current thrills and unifies the people of the 
globe. Power and production, highways and transports have 
been so multiplied and improved by inventive genius, that with- 



1034 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

in the century of our Independence 64,000,000 of people have 
happy homes and improved conditions Avithin our borders. We 
have accumulated wealth far beyond the visions of the Cathay 
of Columbus, or the El Dorado of De Soto. But the farmers 
and freeholders, the savings banks and shops illustrate its 
universal distribution. The majority are its possessors and 
administrators. In housing and living, in the elements which 
make the toiler a self-respecting and respected citizen in 
avenues of hope and ambition for children, in all that gives 
broader scope and keener pleasure to existence, the people of 
this Republic enjoy advantages far beyond those of other 
lands. The unequaled and phenomenal progress of the country 
has opened wonderful opportunities for making fortunes and 
stimulated to madness the desire and rush for the accumulation 
of money. 

Material prosperity has not debased literature nor debauched 
the press; it has neither paralyzed nor repressed intellectual^ 
activity. American science and letters have received rank 
and recognition in the older centers of learning. The demand 
for higher education has so taxed the resources of the ancient 
universities as to compel the foundation and liberal endow- 
ment of colleges all over the Union. Journals, remarkable in 
their ability, independence, and power, find their strength, 
not in the patronage of government or the subsidies of wealth, 
but in the support of a Nation of newspaper readers. The 
humblest and poorest person has in periodicals whose price is 
counted in pennies, a library larger, fuller, and more varied 
than was within the reach of the rich in the time of 
Columbus. 

The sum of human happiness has been infinitely increased 
by the millions from the old world who have improved their 
conditions in the new, and the returning tide of lesson and 
experience has incalculably enriched the fatherlands. The 
divine right of kings has taken its place with the instruments 
of mediaeval torture among the curiosities of the antiquary. 
Only the shadow of kingly authority stands between the 
government of themselves, by themselves, and the people of 
Norway and Sweden. The union in one empire of States 






ORATION— HON. CHAUNCE5 M. DEPEW. 1035 

of Germany, is the symbol of Teutonic power, and the hope 
of German liberalism. The petty despotisms of Italy have 
been merged into a nationality which has centralized its 
authority in its ancient capital on the hills of Rome. France 
was rudely roused from the sullen submission of centuries to 
intolerable tyranny, by her soldiers returning from service in 
the American revolution. The wild orgies of the reign of 
terror were the revenges and excesses of a people, who had 
discovered their power, but were not prepared for its benefi- 
cent use. She fled from herself into the arms of Napoleon. 
He, too, was a product of the American experiment. Mr 
played with kings as with toys, and educated Fiance for liberty. 
In the processes of her evolution from darkness to light, 
she tried Bourbon, and Orleanist, and the third Napoleon, 
and cast them aside. Now in the fullness of time, and 
through the training in the school of hardest experience, the 
French people have reared and enjoy a permanent republic. 
England of the Mayflower, and of James II. ; England of 
George III. and of Lord North, has enlarged suffrage, and 
is to-day animated aud governed by the democratic spirit. 
She has her throne, admirably occupied by one of the wisest 
of sovereigns and best of women, but it would not survive one 
dissolute and unworthy successor. She has her hereditary 
peers, but the House of Lords will be brushed aside the 
moment it resists the will of the people. 

The time has arrived for both a closer union and greater 
distance between the old world and the new. The former in- 
discriminate welcome to our prairies and the presenl invitation 
to these palaces of art and industry mark the passing period 
Unwatched and unhealthy immigration can no longer lie 
permitted to our shores. We must have a National quaran- 
tine against disease, pauperism, and crime. We do not want 
candidates for our hospitals, our poorhouses, or jails. We 
cannot admit those who come to undermine our institutions 
and subvert our laws. But we will gladly throw wide our 
gates for, and receive with open arms, those who by intelligence 
and virtue, by thrift and loyalty, are worthy of receiving the 
equal advantages of the priceless gift of American citizen- 



1036 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

ship. The spirit and object of this exhibition are peace and 
kinship. 

Three millions of Germans, who are among the best citizens 
of the Republic, send greeting to the Fatherland their pride 
in its glorious history, its ripe literature, its traditions and asso- 
ciations. Irish, equal in number to those who still remain upon 
the Emerald Isle, who have illustrated their devotion to their 
adopted country on many a battlefield fighting for the Union 
and its perpetuity, have rather intensified than diminished 
their love for the land of the shamrock, and their sympathy 
with the aspirations of their brethren at home. The Italian, 
the Spaniard, and the Frenchman, the Norwegian, the Swede, 
and the Dane, the English, the Scotch, and the Welsh, are 
none the less loyal and devoted Americans because in this 
congress of their kin the tendrils of affection draw them closer 
to the hills and valleys, the legends and the loves associated 
with their youth. 

Edmund Burke, speaking in the British Parliament with 
prophetic voice, said: "A great revolution has happened — a 
revolution made, not by chopping and changing of power in 
any of the existing States, but by the appearance of a new 
State, of a new species, in a new part of the globe. It has 
made as great a change in all the relations and balances and 
gravitations of power as the appearance of a new planet would 
in the system of the solar world." Thus was the humiliation 
of our successful revolt tempered to the motherland by pride 
in the State created by her children. If we claim heritage 
in Bacon, Shakespeare, and Milton, we also acknowledge that 
it was for liberties guaranteed Englishmen by sacred charters 
our fathers triumphantly fought. While wisely rejecting 
throne and caste and privilege and an established church in 
their new-born state, they adopted the substance of English 
Liberty and the body of English law. Closer relations than 
with other lands and a common language rendering easy 
interchanges of criticisms and epithets sometimes irritate and 
offend, but the heart of republican America beats with 
responsive pulsations to the hopes and aspirations of the 
poeple of Great Britain. 



ORATION— HON. (MIAI-NCKY M. DKI'KW. 1037 

The grandeur and beauty of this spectacle are the eloquent 
witnesses of peace and progress. The Parthenon and the 
cathedral exhausted the genius of the ancient, and the skill 
of the mediaeval architects, in housing the statue or spirit of 
Deity. In their ruins or their antiquity they are mute pro- 
tests against the merciless enmity of nations, which forced art 
to flee to the altar for protection. The United States welcome 
the sister republic of the southern and northern continents, and 
the nations and peoples of Europe and Asia, of Africa and 
Australia, with the products of their lands, of their skill and 
of their industry to this city of yesterday, yet clothed with 
royal splendor as the Queen of the Great Lakes. The artists 
and architects of the country have been bidden to design and 
erect the buildings which shall fitly illustrate the height of 
our civilization and the breadth of our hospitality. The 
peace of the world permits and protects their efforts in utiliz- 
ing their powers for men's temporal welfare. The result is 
this park of palaces. The originality and boldness of their 
conceptions and the magnitude and harmony of their creations 
are the contributions of America to the oldest of the arts and 
the cordial bidding of America to the peoples of the earth to 
come and bring their fruitage of their age to the boundless 
opportunities of this unparalleled exhibition. 

If interest in the affairs of this world is vouchsafed to those 
who have gone before, the spirit of Columbus hovers over us 
to-day. Only by celestial intelligence can it grasp the full 
significance of this spectacle and ceremonial. 

From the first century to the fifteenth counts for little in the 
history of progress, but in the period between the fifteenth 
and the twentieth is crowded the romance and reality of 
human development. Life has been prolonged, and its enjoy- 
ment intensified. The powers of the air and the water, 
the resistless forces of the elements which in the time of 
the discoverer were the visible terrors of the wrath of 
God, have been subdued to the service of man. Art 
and luxuries which could be possessed and enjoyed only 
by the rich and noble, the works of genius which were 
read and understood only by the learned few, domestic 



1038 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

comforts and surroundings beyond the reach of lord or bishop, 
now adorn and illumine the homes of our citizen. Serfs are 
sovereigns and the people are kings. The trophies and 
splendors of their reign are commonwealths, rich in every 
attribute of great States, and united in a Republic whose 
power and prosperity, and liberty and enlightenment are the 
wonder and admiration of the world. 

All hail, Columbus, discoverer, dreamer, hero and apostle. 
We, here, of every race and country, recognize the heroism 
which bounded his vision and the infinite scope of his genius. 
The voice of gratitude and praise for all the blessings which 
have been showered upon mankind by his adventure is limited 
to no language, but is uttered in every tongue. Neither 
marble nor brass can fitly form his statue. Continents are 
his monument, and unnumbered millions, past, present and 
to come, who enjoy in the liberties and their happiness the 
fruits of his faith, will reverently guard and preserve, from 
century to century, his name and fame. 



INVOCATION. 

BY W. H. MILBURN, D.D., CHAPLAIN OF THE 

UNITED STATES SENATE, 

AT THE OPENING OF THE WORLD'S FAIR, CHICAGO, MAI 

1st, 1893. 

All glory be to Thee, Lord God of hosts, that Thou hast 
moved the hearts of all kindred tongues, people and nations 
to keep ;i feast of tabernacles in this place, in commemoration 
of that most momentous of all voyages, by which Columbus 
lifted the veil that hid the New World from the Old and 
opened the gateway of the future for mankind. Thy servants 
havebuilded these more than imperial palaces, many-chamb- 
ered and many-galleried, in which to store and showman's vic- 
tories over air, earth, fire and flood — engines of use, treasures 
of beauty, and promise of the years that are to be in illustration 
of the world's advance within those four hundred years. 
Woman, too, the shackles falling from her hands and estate, 
throbbing with the pulse of the new time, joyously treading 
the paths of larger freedom, responsibility and self-help open- 
ing before her; woman, nearer to God by the intuitions of 
the heart and the grandeur of her self-sacrifice, brings the 
inspiration of her genius, the product of her hand, brain and 
sensibility to shed a grace and loveliness upon the place, thus 
making the house beautiful. 

To Thee, holiest among the mighty, mightiest among the 
holy, whose hand has lifted the gates of great empires from 
their hinges and turned the stream of history into new 
channels; to Thee, our risen and ascended Lord, we dedicate 
these trophies of the past, achievements of the present and 
prophecies of the future, laying them reverently and with 
humility and yet with rapture of thanks and praise at the 
foot of Thy cross, for Thou hast redeemed as by Thy blood 
and made us kings and priests unto our God. 



1040 OUR NATIONAL JUBIXEE 

Upon thine honored servants the President of the United 
States, the members of his Cabinet, the judges of the 
Supreme Court, the Senators and Representatives of the 
people and all other magistrates throughout our broad land, 
upon that most illustrious sovereign of the world, our kins- 
woman, revered and beloved in this land as in her own, the 
gracious lady, Queen Victoria; upon all presidents, emperors, 
kings, queens and other rulers of whatever name or degree, 
and upon all the people and nations over which they may 
sway, we pray that the benediction of the King of Kings and 
Lord of Lords may descend and abide, hastening the time 
when nations shall learn war no more, when the sword shall 
be beaten into the ploughshare and the spear into the pruning 
hook. 

Thou alone Lord, knowest the wellnigh insuperable 
obstacles surmounted, the envies, jealousies and bickerings 
allayed, the open hostilities and insidious opposition mastered 
by dauntless courage and inexhaustible patience, the unex- 
ampled fertility of resource and resistless energy by which 
the men engaged in this mighty undertaking have brought it 
to a triumphant consummation. Crown their labor and 
victory with Thy gracious words, "Well done, good and 
faithful servants," and make the world to echo Thy plaudits. 

Send thy blessing upon this, Thy city, itself one of the 
wonders of the world, whose site within the memory of living 
men was a pasture for wild beasts, the lair of the wolf and 
nest of the rattlesnake, but now sits enthroned as one of the 
capitals of the earth and throws wide its gates of hospitable 
welcome to the people of. all languages and climes: grant to 
those that dwell within its borders the blessing which maketh 
rich and briugeth no sorrow. Father, Supreme, be Thou the 
guardian of our land, defending us from whirlwinds, floods, 
hail and blight, keeping far from our shores, the plague of 
cholera and every other pestilence, and stir up our whole 
people to be working with Thee by sanity and sanitation, 
temperance in meat and drink, chastity and all methods of 
right living, to insure themselevs and their children health, 
length of days and peace. 



INVOCATION — REV. W. II. MILIUTRN. 1041 

Make this World's Fair a Sabbatic year for tbe whole 
human race— a year of jubilee in which -the heavy and 
grinding yoke of ill-paid labor shall be exchanged for the yoke 
of Him who is meek and lowly in heart, in which love to God 
and love to man shall become the rule of all men's lives, so 
that with one voice the whole world may ring out with the 
anthem which angels sang over the sheep folds of Bethlehem, 
"Glory to God in the highest, on earth peace, good will to 
men." 

Closing with the words of the Lord's Prayer. 



ADDEESS. 
BY DIRECTOR-GENERAL GEORGE R. DAVIS, 

AT THE OPENING OF THE WORLD'S FAIR MAY 1, 1893. 

The dedication of these grounds and buildings for the 
purposes of an international exhibition took place on the 21st 
of last October, at which time they were accepted for the 
objects to which they were destined by the action of the Con- 
gress of the United States. This is not the time nor the place, 
neither will it be expected of me, to. give a comjDrehensive 
resume of the strenuous efforts which have been put forth to 
complete the work to which we invite your inspection to-day. 
I may be permitted, however, to say a word in praise of, and 
in gratitude to, my co-officers and official staff, who form the 
great organization which made this consummation possible. 

This exposition is not the conception of any single mind. 
It is not the result of any single effort, but it is the grandest 
conception of all the minds and the best obtainable result of 
all the efforts put forth by all the people who have in any 
manner contributed to its consideration. 

The great commanding agencies through which the govern- 
ment has authorized this work to proceed are the National 
Commission, consisting of 108 men and their alternates, 
selected from the several States and Territories, presided over 
by the Hon. Thomas W. Palmer, of Michigan: the corpora- 
tion of the State of Illinois known as the World's Columbian 
Exposition, consisting of fifteen directors, presided over by 
Mr. II. N. Higginbotham of Chicago, and the board of Lady 
Managers, consisting of 115 women and their alternates, 
selected from the several States, presided over by Mrs. Potter 
Palmer, of Chicago. 

To these great agencies, wisely selected by Congress, each 
performing its special function, the gratitude of the people of 
this country and the cordial recognition of all these friendly 
foreign representatives are due. 

To perfect from these agencies an efficient organization 






ADDRESS — HON. GEORGE R. DAVIS. 1043 

was oul' first duty, and it was successfully accomplished at 
the outset through committees, subsequently by great ex- 
ecutive departments, and through these departments the 
systematic, vigorous and effective work has progressed. 
Through the department of administration, the department 
of finance, the department of works and the great exhibit 
departments the plan and scope of a grand international 
exposition have been worked out. The department of finance, 
composed of members of the Illinois corporation, has, with 
disinterestedness remarkable, with courage undaunted, suc- 
cessfully financed the exposition, and has provided for the 
great work upward of $20,000,000. 

The department of works and its many bureaus of artists, 
architects, engineers and builders, have transformed these 
grounds, which twenty-one months ago were an unsightly, 
uninviting and unoccupied stretch of landscape, into the 
beauty and splendor of to-day. They have conspicuously 
performed their functions, and these grand avenues, these 
Venetian waterways, the finished landscape, the fountains 
aud sculptures and colonnades, and those grand palaces, stand 
out a monument to their genius and their skill, supplemented 
by the labor of that great army of skilled artisans and work- 
men, all citizens of this Republic. 

The chiefs of the great departments who have exploited 
this mighty enterprise aud gathered here the exhibits forming 
the picture that is set in this magnificent frame have con- 
firmed the wisdom of their selection. No State or Territory 
of the Union has escaped their voices; no hind on the globe 
that has a language but has been visited and the invitation 
of the President of the United States personally presented. 
Fortunately, at the inception of this enterprise our govern- 
ment was, and still is, at peace with the whole world. Com- 
missioners were sent to Europe, to Asia, to Australia, British 
North America and to the islands of the seas; so that to-day 
the whole world knows, and is familiar with the significance 
of the great peace festival we are about to inaugurate upon 
this campus, and all the nations join in celebrating the event 
which it commemorates. 



10-14 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

This enclosure, containing nearly seven hundred acres 
covered by more than four hundred structures, from the small 
State pavilion occupying an ordinary building site to the 
colossal structure of the Manufactures and Liberal Arts 
Buildings, covering over thirty acres, is rilled and crowded 
with a display of the achievements and products of the mind 
and hand of man such as has never before been presented to 
mortal vision. The habits, customs and life of the peoples 
of our own and foreign lands are shown in the variegated 
plaisance. These stately buildings on the north are filled with 
the historical treasures and natural products of our several 
States. 

The artistic, characteristic and beautiful edifices the head- 
quarters of foreign commissions, surrounding the Gallery of 
Fine Arts, which in itself will be an agreeable surprise to the 
American beholder, constitute the grand central zone of social 
and friendly amenities among the different peoples of the 
earth. Surrounding this grand plaza where we stand, and 
reaching from the north pond to the extreme south, is the 
great mechanical, scientific, industrial and agricultural 
exhibition of the resources and products of the world. 

These have been secured from the four quarters of the 
globe and placed in systematic order under the supervision 
of these great departments; and while all the material upon 
the grounds is not yet in place. I am gratified to be able to 
present to the President of the United States at this time an 
official catalogue containing a description and the location of 
the exhibits of four thousand participants in the exhibition. 
The number of exhibitors will exceed sixty thousand when 
everything is in place. The citizens of our country are proud, 
and always will be proud, of the action of the Congress of the 
United States of America in authorizing and directing this 
celebration to take place, for the appropriations of more than 
$5,000,000 in its aid and for the unswerving support and en- 
couragement of the officers of the government. To the 
States of the Union we are largely indebted for active 
and substantial support. A sum in excess of $6,000,000 
has been raised and expended by the States and Territories for 



ADDRESS — HON. GEORGE R. DAVIS. 1045 

their official use in promoting their own interests conjointly 
with the general success of the exhibition. To the foreign 
nations who have a representation upon these grounds never 
before witnessed at any exposition, as shown by the grand 
exhibits they have brought here and the hundreds of official 
representatives of foreign governments who are present on 
this occasion, we bow in grateful thanks. 

More than $6,000,000 have been officially appropriated for 
these commissions in futherance of their participation in the 
exposition. The great nations of Europe and their depend- 
encies are all represented upon these grounds. The govern- 
ments of Asia and of Africa and the republics of the Western 
Hemisphere, with but few exceptions, are here represented. 

To the citizens and corporation of the city of Chicago, who 
have furnished $11,000,000 as a contribution, and in addition 
have loaned the management $5,000,000 more, are due the 
grateful acknowledgment of our own people and of all the 
honored guests who share with us the advantages of this great 
international festival. 

To the women of Chicago and our great land, whose prompt, 
spontaneous and enthusiastic co-operation in our work turned 
the eyes of the world toward the exposition as toward a new 
star of the East — an inspiration for womanhood everywhere — 
we extend our cordial and unstinted recognition. 

It is our hope that this great exposition may inaugurate a new 
era of moral and national progress, and our fervent aspiration 
that the association of the nations here may secure not only 
warmer and stronger friendships, but lasting peace throughout 
the world. The grand concerted illustration of modern prog- 
ress which is here presented — encouragement of art, science, 
of industry, of commerce — has necessitated an expenditure, 
including the outlay of our exhibitors, largely in excess of 
$100,000,000. 

We have given it our constant thought, our most devoted 
service, our best energy, and now, in this central city of this 
great Republic, on the continent discovered by Columbus, 
whose distinguished descendants are present as the honored 
guests of our nation, it only remains for you, Mr. President, 



1()46 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

if in your opinion the exposition here presented is commen- 
surate in dignity with what the world should expect of our 
great country, to direct that it shall be opened to the public, 
and when you touch this magic key the ponderous machinery 
will start in its revolutions and the activities of the exposition 
will begin. 



ADDRESS. 

BY HON. GROVER CLEVELAND, PRESIDENT OF 
THE UNITED STATES. 

AT THE OPENING OF THE WORLD'S FAIR MAY 1, 1893. 

I am here to join my fellow citizens in the congratulations 
which befit this occasion. Surrounded by the stupendous 
results of American enterprise and activity, and in view of 
magnificent evidences of American skill and intelligence, we 
need not fear that these congratulations will be exaggerated. 
We stand to-day in the presence of the oldest nations of the 
world, point to the great achievements we here exhibit, asking 
no allowance on the score of youth. 

The enthusiasm with which we contemplate our work 
intensifies the warmth of the greeting we extend to those who 
have come from foreign lands to illustrate with us the growth 
and progress of human endeavor in the direction of a higher 
civilization. 

We who believe that popular education and the stimulation 
of the best impulses of our citizens lead the way to a realization 
of the national destiny which our faith promises, gladly 
welcome the opportunity here afforded us to see the results 
accomplished by efforts which have been exerted longer than 
ours in the field of man's improvement, while in appreciative 
return we exhibit the unparalleled advancement and wonderful 
accomplishments of a young nation and present the triumphs 
of a vigorous, self-reliant and independent people. 

We have built these splendid edifices, but we have also built 
the magnificent fabric of a popular government whose grand 
proportions are seen throughout the world. We have made, 
and here gathered together objects of use and beauty, the 
products of American skill and invention. We have also 
made men who rule themselves. 

It is an exalted mission in which we and our guests from 






1048 OUR NATIONAL JUBILEE. 

other lands are engaged, as we co-operate in the inauguration 
of an enterprise devoted to human enlightenment, and in the 
undertaking we here enter upon we exemplify in the noblest 
sense the brotherhood of nations. 

Let us hold fast to the meaning that underlies this cere- 
mony and let us not lose the impressiveness of this moment. 
As by a touch the machinery that gives life to this vast ex- 
position is now set in motion, so at the same instant let our 
hopes and aspirations awaken forces which in all time to come 
shall influence the welfare, the dignity and the freedom of 
mankind. 



The President then touched an electric button and the 
great engine of 8000 horse power was set in motion. 



